So I play a lot of older PC games on a rather modern Windows 11 PC. This is a hobby of mine and one that cause me to cry all the time because OMG it is so fucking hard most days. So I am going to share a few tips.
First tip is PCGamingWiki. This site is fucking fantastic. A lot of times you will find patches and guides how to fix specific problems with games running. This isn't just for older games there are up to date wikis for a lot of modern games too.
The next two links are all about glide and DirectX. Glide was the api 3dfx used for their graphics cards. Lots of older games will not run with out it. Thankfully 3dfx made the api open source before going defunct so we have two really great options for glide games. First is nGlide which is just a program you install on your PC and it will translate glide calls either into DX11 or Vulkan. It's my preferred method for most glide games. Secondly we have dgvoodoo. This is both a glide wrapper and a Direct X wrapper from DX1-9. I don't use it for a glide wrapper often, but it is an excellent and probably the best way to get older DX titles running especially in the DX6-7 games.
Audio is another tricky component. If you have a Creative Soundcard you have access to Alchemy which can restore 3D Positional audio for older games. These cards will also make 3D Positional Audio work in OpenAL games as well. If you don't have a Creative card I would then recommend OpenAL-Soft. This is an open source actively in development api for restoring 3D Audio to older games. It takes some work to setup but I believe it is totally worth it.
Lastly GOG. Why GOG? Well for one it has a large DRM free library of older games and secondly unlike Steam they actually bundle their games with patches and mods that can make them more compatible on modern systems. Now not all of these games have this but most in my experience do. GOG actually tries to make sure they are compatible before selling the game.
I am somewhat a dummy I made this and cohosted it (I have no idea what the word for posting shit is on this site) yesterday which was thanksgiving. Anyhow re-cohosting it today so anyone interested might get to see it.
