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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

You have an executable with gog, but playing it forever requires long term support.

I don’t expect whatever windows may or may not be available in 2060 to be able to support such a download from 2025 in a playable fashion.

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I think this is a moot argument, especially for x86 arch. I can run nearly almost any game built for windows 98 - till now, on linux.

Any game ever can run very well on any modern hardware using emulators or virtual machines.

That is quite false, especially if you mean "out of the box". And it's likely a temporary situation - there's no guarantee whatsoever that people will maintain x86 and some specific Nvidia Pixel Shader emulation support 50 years from now.

This has already happened, PC Gaming Wiki has entries for lots of games where support for various old methods of doing things no longer work, on real hardware on windows, and you need to use a variety of workarounds like dgvoodoo or a fix by a random third party modder to get the game to operate correctly. And that's before you consider defunct copy protection or trying to add improvements.

Given the amount of work emulator authors go to supporting consoles like the Neo Geo CD, with 8 not very good games (they had to do serious work, over many years, breaking the encryption), and the amazing cycle accurate emulators for consoles like NES and SNES, I’m confident we will continue to have good emulators in the future for any system anyone cares about.

nVidia has dropped 32-bit PhysX support in 50-series cards, significantly impacting some older-but-not-old games, and there’s no real solution yet except to own an older card.

There was an awkward period of 3d accelerated games that required 16-bit framebuffers; I've had no success getting them to run in emulation

I fully expect windows to not support such games.

And I also fully expect wine on linux to support them all. I like a lot of old games, and they run much better under wine than in windows these days.

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