I liked ‘Master of Magic’ which came out in about 1995.
Recently I ordered it from GOG (Good Old Games) and it works perfectly on both Windows 7, Linux and Vista. 
I have no connection (financial or otherwise) to GOG, but recommend them highly.
Myst is available on steam. I picked up Myst, Riven, Uru, and a re-mastered version of Myst for 5 bucks on Steam a year or so ago.
GOG seems to have a pretty great reputation for old games. I think they do some fiddling with them before release so they work on newer systems with minimum hassle. Steam is much more hit or miss in that regard. Sometimes a Steam release will get some tweaks, other times not.
Are you kidding?
With Star Citizen, No Man’s Sky, Elite: Dangerous, Enemy Star Fighter and Eve: Valkyrie these things are coming back into vogue!!
I just order my first HOTAS since… Free Space 2?
I feel for you. I have been considering putting a Win98SE partition on my desktop, because the computer harddrive is a terabyte, and would hardly notice the data, because it takes very little room. I can then run the games on the partition. Alternately, I can get a used HD that is small (like 60GB-- I have an old one) and put it in the computer with an adapter from IDE to SATA which costs about $5, and install 98SE on that. The only problem is that I doubt I can get any of the updates and patches for it, but it will probably run the games without them. I think I know where I can get a 98SE install disk.
I actually have an XP install disk, but some of the games already won’t run on XP.
The real problem will be getting old versions of video drivers, if the video isn’t compatible with the old OS.
FWIW, I had a couple of games that wouldn’t run on XP or 7, but run on 8, and the problem was with NVIDIA, which didn’t know about compatibility issues with old games and new OSs, nor how many people were actually concerned. Private users were making patches you could download, and when NVIDIA caught on, the makers made sure that if the OS could run the game (Oregon Trail is one), NVIDIA would support it.
I feel for you too. It breaks my heart that I can no longer play Dungeon Keeper on my Win 7. I was the best Keeper ever.
My solution is to keep around a working computer of any generation necessary to play any game I feel like playing.
But I keep (and maintain) a lot of old computers, and not just for that reason. So this solution may not work for anyone else.
I have Dungeon Keeper 2 from GOG.com. Works just fine on Win 7.
I helped my parents buy their first Windows 8 machine last December, moving them up from an XP machine. Sadly, Mom’s favorite solitaire game, Solitaire’s Journey for Windows, won’t run on Windows 8. It is a 16bit Windows 3.x program from the early 1990s. So DOSBox wasn’t any help either in getting it to run. I tried to set up a Ubuntu VM with the Wine windows emulator running on it before I left town, but ran out of time before I could get that into a usable state. It wasn’t so much the games themselves, but the more than 10 years of statistics that Mom had built up.
Many games store statistics in text files. If she just wants that, there should be an *.ini file for the app that would contain all that data.
Master of Magic is a great gama (An even though it was released in 1995, I only discovered it ten years later, when it was already an antique. It’s the only game I ever bought a companion book for (ordered from an American used books seller), and it came pretty handy. That’s one of my classiscs that I will replay once in a while.
However, playing it on modern computer isn’t a problem, since it’s a DOS game. It runs on DOSbox.
Games that are a problem are those too recent to be DOS but too old not to have some issues with recent computers. I can’t play Imperialism anymore , for instance (early 2000, I think).
Master of Magic and Master of Orion are the one two punch of greatest strat games of all time.
Oooo, you are my new best friend. Thank you!
If Grim Fandango is your thing, you need to get your hands on ResidualVM. More specifically, you need to get your hands on the point-and-click modded version. Yes, that means what you think it means.
DOSBox will work. You just need to install Windows 3.1 in it.
As for anything else, just Google how to get it to run. There’s always a way.
Nearly all joysticks are USB now. They are far from something ancient, although most people tend to use gamepads with thumbsticks, like PlayStation or Xbox controllers. But you can still get pure joysticks if you’d rather.
You can also get USB to Joystick port adapters, if you really want to use that old joystick.
You won’t find a lot of old ports on modern computers. It’s USB or nothing, as far as peripherals go.
::Turns around, gazes over shelf full of joysticks:: Who got rid of them? I mean, I suppose you could play Freespace without force feedback, but why on Earth would you want to? A shame about your ports, though. Nowadays, anything you can use is going to be USB, unless you’re running some specialist hardware.
Speaking of which, I’ve always thought that a fun puzzle in a modern adventure game would be getting a copy of Wing Commander 3 to run on a 386 without an extended memory manager. And you can’t beat the final boss until you install and configure DOOM, then successfully join a deathmatch game.
That’s cool. I may get ResidualVM if I want to play GF again, although as someone noted upthread, there’s a remastered version coming out soon! As for Grimmouse, unlike most people, I actually didn’t mind GF’s keyboard controls. They definitely didn’t bother me enough(if at all) to detract from the story, which was the point.
My parents didn’t have Windows 3.1 in their software library, naturally. I figured that was a possibility, but I didn’t want to delve into scummier portions of the Internet where an “Windows 3.1 installer” Google search might have led me on my parents factory fresh machine. VirtualBox+Ubuntu+Wine was most clean and legal way I figured it would work. I got all that running, but wasn’t able to optimize the setup it so it wasn’t dog-slow before I left town.
And alas, the statistic file for that the game kept was a .DAT file in their own home-grown binary format, unreadable except to their .exe.
I just bought myself my first Windows 8.1 desktop machine, so I’ll likely have some practice getting some old windows games working myself. Does Chip’s Challenge still run in Windows 8?
While there are good communities surrounding a lot of old games that don’t run on modern systems, I have to say I wish I could play some of the old TSR D&D Goldbox games. Seriously, would pay many monies to play Pool of Radiance again. It was crashy as hell in its day, though, so I can’t even imagine the difficulties now. I’ve heard of places having usable copies but can never seem to find them, and I have my original diskettes (albeit for Mac) somewhere so I wouldn’t feel guilty downloading the assets. Sigh.