[qplex]

>"emulating" the (fairly small) subset of the traditional Win32 and DirectX APIs required for typical games might even make sense on Windows itself, should Microsoft one day decide to deprecate

I recently tried to run some WinXP-era games on modern hardware, and had absolutely no luck on Windows 10.

However some of the games ran fine on Wine (and 64-bit Linux).

The only downside I see to emulation is latency, but for many games this doesn't matter, and it's worthy to keep them runnable like this.

[outworlder]

> The only downside I see to emulation is latency

There shouldn't be significant latency issues, unless there is large amounts of (CPU) work that's required to make large data structures compatible(for a silly example, imagine that the texture formats are different and you need to convert between them). Or if you need to simulate a single function call in a tight loop with several calls.

But the overhead is usually not much more significant than what you get when you import a library to call OS functions on your behalf, versus calling them yourself.