Still risky. Any piracy of mine stopped once I had enough disposable income (and Steam etc. came along) to more conveniently buy the game. Which is an interesting commentary on the supposed lost sale for every pirate copy: when I couldn't afford it, there was no potential sale actually lost. I certainly understand budget-driven piracy though.
Anyway, if you're running pirate copies of any variety, I'd recommend a sandbox of some sort. VMware Player is free, and in my experience faster than VirtualBox. It won't passthrough a dedicated GPU though so it would only be good for older games. you'd need Workstation Pro to get that. Or a Linux distro like Proxmox that runs a bare-metal hypervisor.
Anyway, if you're running pirate copies of any variety, I'd recommend a sandbox of some sort. VMware Player is free, and in my experience faster than VirtualBox. It won't passthrough a dedicated GPU though so it would only be good for older games. you'd need Workstation Pro to get that. Or a Linux distro like Proxmox that runs a bare-metal hypervisor.