[LauraMedia]

I thought the same but let's not pretend Windows is a holy grail for compatibility anymore. Especially when it comes to older games, this facade / image breaks down fast.

I once tried to play Trackmania Nations (not Forever or United Forever, the ESWC one) because that was the first entry of this series I played. I still have all the files from back then so I thought it would be as simple as installing it and running it. Other games such as Trackmania Sunrise came with the nasty SecureROM DRM that will break your current installs, but ESWC was always free to play and without DRM.

Well, after install, I played a lot in my first sitting. A few days later, my Windows install was broken. I used a restore point before installing Trackmania, everything was back to stable. A few weeks later I tried again, same situation, a day or two after install, my Windows would break.

I thought it was a general system instability, maybe some weird configuration and the game only triggers that specific bug. So I did a full clean reinstall. And installed the game a few days later. Who would've thought, my Windows breaks yet again.

What I'm trying to say is: I've been running Fedora on my main PC for 2 years now and the game has been installed via Proton for 1 year. It never broke, it always just worked.

[krige]

That's cool but I spent the last week trying to get midi music in dosbox under Mint. It's still not working. Midi. And Wine works until it suddenly doesn't and searching for solution you get stonewalled with modern day equivalent of rtfms or plain old radio silence.

[Brett_Riverboat]

Thats always the worst part of linux for me. Everyone is always so hostile, I have to say though I have had a little success finding help on lemmy but not much.

[csdreamer7]

To add to this Nathan Briggs does reverse engineering to make old games work on modern Windows. Windows 11 has corrected faults in it's APIs that probably should have been fixed but somehow worked with older versions of Windows that gamedevs built around. He often posts the solution and sends it GOG. Often this involves updating a community maintained wrapper around the DirectX APIs that GOG uses.

I think you will really like this content.

https://www.youtube.com/@nathanbaggs

[pcdoodle]

I think he means he likes his .exe's, I too like a good exe or msi.