Many people are still skeptical about wine and proton but in the future it will become the way to play Windows' existing game library. I always say that if you care about games preservation, you need to look at Linux & Proton. Even if a future version of wine/proton introduces some breaking changes, you can always use an older version for a particular game, much more comfortable than messing with Windows XP VMs and whatnot.
Wine and proton frontends are becoming so friendly too. Setting things up on e.g. steam deck is extremely easy, not just for wine but even for emulators (emudeck). Just click some buttons and you get everything set up for you and auto-updated.
I couldn't agree more, with the addition of dosbox and PCem/86box.
There's a ton of titles from the late 90s onwards to ~2010 that don't work correctly on modern Windows - either very unreliable, have something fundamental broken, or don't start at all.
This especially applies to games from the from the pre-Vista era - things like DirectSound & DirectDraw being rewritten in Vista broke a lot. In addition, newer GPUs & drivers have broken older games - even big names like The Sims 2 have graphical artifacting - unless you use DXVK! I understand that sometimes this is due to the game doing something incorrect that happened to work okay at the time, but that's still unhelpful if I want to get something to run.
Running games from my childhood requires a mix of dosbox (for most classic DOS titles), PCem/86box (for really weird old titles that don't run on anything that isn't win95/98, or DOS titles that relied on 3dfx hardware).
Get a bit newer and it's dgVoodoo2 (for games that use old DirectX or Glide), DXVK (even on windows!), or I just give up and run them on Linux with Wine - which usually just works. The odd title still needs some patching (like eg Max Payne, but that's because of a CPU incompatibility with AMD Zen CPUs) - but it's nearly always less hassle than trying to run older titles on Windows 10 or 11.
I must be missing something, everytime I try to do something I end up wasting a day to get something to work unreliably. Seemingly simple apps that ought to only require the most common dependencies (such as dotnet/ie) are a nightmare to setup for me.
Every other time I try to do something the dependencies fails to download or there are bugs preventing stuff from installing.
What am I missing? Maybe games happens to bundle most they need themselves?
Runs most of my windows software with little to no issue, and is more compatible with older games than Windows 10/11 itself!