Since XP support is ending in a few hours and apparently becoming a timebomb waiting to take all your personal details and give it to someone in the Phillipines to buy child porn with, it'd be good to know if any of the post-XP OSes are at least as compatible and friendly as XP is. I remember when XP came along and people hated it because a lot of games they had wouldn't start and get errors. Then XP eventually got most games working. Then I remember XP users hating I think Windows 7 or Vista for the same reason. What's the situation now? Is Windows 7's compatibility mode faultless?
I used W7 and now W8.1 with very few issues. It's most likely game dependent, and the compatibility mode is not faultless no. What games are you wanting to play?
Depends on the game. W8 is not compatible with a fair few older games, but W7 usually is. One of the reasons I like gog.com is that they put a bit of work into ensuring that old games are compatible with newer OSs (even if that just means automating a wrapper for them). Games from there are mostly sound on all newer Windows versions.
Get Windows 7, I've had no problems with it so far with games that worked on XP. When I've checked out the Steam forums for particular games, Win8 incompatibility crops up quite a bit even on some recent games.
I never made the jump from XP to Vista because of how much it was disliked for all sorts of reasons, not just for the gaming problems. I jumped to Windows 7 over a year ago and so far I haven't had any serious gaming problems that couldn't be resolved with either a patch (sometimes several) or a workaround. There are only two, out of all that I've tried, that I haven't fixed yet and they are the original Max Payne and Quake 4. The MP issue is apparently caused by the game installer not knowing how to deal with UAC in Win7 and its a simple work around to get it to load. Quake 4 is a result of the game not being able to recognise modern hardware and the graphics are poor quality despite having a good modern gaming pc, there are workarounds for this (some of it depends on whether you have an ATI GPU or Nvidia) but I simply haven't got to this one yet. So, in short, Win7 does have some issues with older games but nothing (so far) that can be fixed, can't comment in Win 8 or 8.1 as I haven't tried them yet. My current project is to get Mechwarrior 2 up and running, got most of it sorted, just haven't figured out how to get the instructors speech to work during the training missions.
Running as Admin and adding the exe files on older games to DEP on Win 7 usually fires them up. Only issues I have come across is with some of the CD's checks and it just constantly asks for the original disc even though it's there, you can however fix this easily enough. Dosbox is pretty easy to use, only really need to do a few commands to get things up and running from the command line. GOG has been awesome with a lot of the better known older games, pre configured to just install and run
As above dosbox for very old games (Wing commander etc) and general tweaks (dep/patches/compatibility mode) for others. On windows 8.1. Some games may need some tweaking but the many popular games have blog post etc about running them. +1 for GOG
From my 200+ Steam Game library the only game having issues (and it had issues with anything post-XP) is Fallout 3. Everything else just works.
this, fallout 3 was just generally crash-happy, the only things I've had that didn't run well/at all on 8, didn't run on xp either...
Generally whatever I fancy from about 1985 - 2100, cryogenic freezing and time machine invention notwithstanding (in which case possibly anything from 4500 onwards).
