Here we are talking about running a 22 years old game on modern PCs.

How well can you run your SNES cartridges on Wii, or PSOne CD games on PS4?

Not even such cross manufacturers needed. Even the great XB360 compatibility effort for XB1 drum they beat as of the last time I checked resulted in only 1 or 2 games of my tower being made compatible. And now they have 2 XB1 versions of which one is supposed to be far more powerful; will that result in games not even be compatible o the very same gen platform?

Out of interest what game are/were you thinking of? Your point #2 sounds very familiar for the game I'm chasing (haven't been able to install a VM yet to check out STARS!)

I'm thinking of Warpath. The original was a 16-bit Windows 3.1 / 95 game. I think it was relabelled Warpath Classic upon the release of a 32-bit version, Warpath 97.

Warpath 21st Century would be the version you're looking for if you wish to game natively on Windows 10.

Edit: Fixed the tagging.

Doubt it. One of my corporate clients still has a need for *shudder* Windows 1 and they have to pay for the keys.

With modern games to modern machines, it's pop in the disk or download the game and then play. None of this worrying about wrong version of windows or dll files or opening movies not playing or starting the game and seeing a black box. I was talking about regular compatibility, not backwards compatibility. Seriously, you guys are twisting my words.
With retro games to retro machines, we are entering an age where old and classic games are getting a renewed interest again. The Snes Classic. The ATGames Genesis and Atari emulators. Even if these new old consoles weren't there, a lot of classic games and consoles are relatively easy to find on places like Ebay or specialty stores. Granted, some of these have a higher rarity or are more cost prohibitive. Then there are some emulator programs for the more popular consoles that are quite easy to use. While it's true retro games are coming back style for PC gamers as well, we have to rely on services like GOG releasing that one old game we might be looking for, and we still have to worry if the computer's operating system is going to cause problems with the game, or we resort to measures like virtual machines or finding that old computer that will run a previous version of Windows.

THIS IS IT !

100% this is the game I was searching for. Thank you very much for solving this for me! I just testdd the Warpath 21st Century and it runs on Windows 8...I'm off to spend the next couple hours playing!

Happy f&#ing days :-D

Really? I honestly thought it couldn't be the game you're looking for because I tend to stray from mainstream games. My
"avid" gaming youth brought me to so many weird games, but I don't regret the time I spent on any of them.

Really glad to be of help.

Maybe when Dan updates the MIX Server tool, there might be a possibility of running 21st Century servers for the lulz.

Hah, that was my thought when I read that post as well.

Well, you gave your comment on a discussion about running a 22 years old 16-bit Windows game on modern 64 bit Windows system. So yes, it was all about backwards compatibility (issues).

If, however, you are talking about running modern games on modern systems, then it isn't really that complicated on PC either nowadays. You buy a brand-new Windows 10 game from e.g. Steam or Windows Store, and run it on your modern Windows 10 computer. You don't need to think about your Windows version or anything, because Windows 10 is supported by default by all new Windows games, just like all new PS4 games support PS4 (but not PS3, or PS2).

Yes there can still be some issues like having a wildly different configuration or using a low-end Windows 10 laptop with a Intel GPU. But this discussion was not about these possible compatibility issues when running modern PC games on modern PCs.

Similarly, you can buy an old PC to run older PC games, or use emulators (even for running old console games, or old computer systems like Amiga 500 and Commodore 64; try the same with modern consoles, running e.g. Amiga games on them). I e.g. bought a couple of years ago an old single-core Pentium machine for 20 euros or so, with the sole purpose of running some older PC (Windows 9x and XP era games) on it that might have compatibility problems on newer PCs. I am running both Windows 98SE and XP side by side on that PC (so far I haven't had to use 98SE, all the older games I tried to get to run worked fine on XP, like Mechwarrior 3 and Nocturne).

What on earth are you talking about? "Having to rely on old computer to run old Windows"? Can you run SNES cartridges on Nintendo Wii or not, or do you have to "resort to measures" like finding an old working SNES unit where that cartridge game runs?

You have odd double-standards with your arguments, like that having to find an old console hardware to play an old console game is normal, but on PC side it is somehow a different thing if one has to use an old PC to play an old PC game.

You make it sound like some kind of weakness that PCs have a wider and more versatile backwards compatibility than what consoles have. Either consoles have no backwards compatibility at all, or if they do, it is usually restricted to some earlier consoles from the same manufacturer (e.g. you can't run PSOne games on XBox One; different manufacturer). On PC, I can run emulators to run games of about any old console known to exist (Coleco, Mattel Intellivision, NES etc. etc. etc.), or old non-x86 computers like Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga 500 etc.

You know what? Forget it.
I'm both a console gamer and a PC gamer, but I will always lean more towards the first than the second, for a number of reasons. That doesn't mean I'm choosing the console experience of something like Battlefront II over the PC experience of X-wing, but if there was, say, suddenly a PC version of Horizon Zero Dawn, I'll probably still choose the console version. Or if I had to choose between buying an authentic SNES on Ebay or running an emulator on a computer, I'm probably choosing the authentic machine. Consoles are plug and play, or as is the case with this modern era, download and play. No muss and no fuss. You can't say that with computers.