RELIVE THE CLASSICS

Play Doom, Quake, Civilization, and many more

YOU PLACE A TREASURED CD-ROM into the disc tray, wistful about the good old days, and excited to see the familiar pixels of an old favorite game. Your PC reacts like a dog watching a magic trick. Autorun doesn’t work. Setup.exe doesn’t work. InstallShield is looking for a longforgotten Windows 98 library file in perpetuity. In a very real and upsetting way, your childhood is no longer compatible with the modern world, and you know that the only way to rekindle it involves hours of compatibility box-checking, Googling, and fiddling. A traumatic moment.

But it doesn’t have to be. Getting software that was designed for much older operating systems and hardware to run on modern machines offers its own intrinsic satisfaction. It’s like breaking the rules, somehow, raising dead software that was never intended to interface with silicon this powerful, and bending an operating system to your will. There are many different avenues to pursue when you’re attempting to do so, and that in itself has its own pros and cons. That variety of approaches means it’s unlikely you’ll truly reach a dead end, to stretch that avenue metaphor to breaking point. But it does also mean the plethora of conflicting information found on message boards suggesting this method or that can make this a tricky task to go about in a methodical manner. So, let’s do exactly that: Let’s turn what would ordinarily be an evening of directionless trial and error into a scientific process. The definitive and exhaustive guide to running old games on a new PC.

Lab coats are optional, but a willingness to install a few programs on your PC and a sound awareness of abandonware law are mandatory in this test environment. With those humble tools, you should be able to run any old game on a Windows 10 PC, however categorical the error messages seem upon the first attempt.