What has been your experience using virtual environments to run old windows games so far? Chaos Gate was playable that way (the only way I could find anymore) before GOG's version made that unnecessary. I am wondering whether people get away with that for other games.

I only really see a need for retro computers for physical disc games that are not on GOG, such as OG Sims/Sims 2, Age of Mythology, Age of Empires series, Rise of Legends, Freelancer, Diablo 2 (though I hope for it to come here), etc. I have a handful of faves (listed and not listed) that aren't likely to get modern DRM-free versions or just plain GOG versions, so having a system to run them is helpful.

Maybe it works for certain games, but at least I didn't have much success in the past when I tried to run e.g. some early Direct3D games on VMWare Player. That was a long time ago though.

I don't know if it has changed, but it never felt like VMWare or VirtualBox (Oracle) were really interested in making their products "gaming friendly". Not as much money to be done there.

I wouldn't call that "a retro computer", you just use an old computer because you're unable or unwilling to run the software on a modern computer.
I don't think that any of the games that you listed are impossible to play on a modern system (with or without the aid of tweaks/tricks/mods/tools/etc...)
I know it's mostly semantics - retro (whatever you think it means, for you) isn't the same as "old".

They are quite dangerous to sit directly behind, too, as when office workers sat in a circle round a group of desks with a cluster of PCs backed together. I'm sure it would be possible to emulate the CRT display to compensate for whatever (flux ?) people feel has been lost in the transition to flat screens.

I've got an original disc for (PS1) Tombraider that I might one day replay. (I'm sure any game saves will have been degaussed by that time, though, so I'll have to restart from scratch, without their benefit.)

My old (2007) laptop (with 32bit Win7 upgrade) still has a bunch of games on it that includes at least two that won't play on my new laptop: Rome: Total War and Septerra Core. I miss Rome, since it was a pretty good mix of tactical and civ-like strategy.

I have almost surpassed my save games (that weren't transferred) for my Shadowrun games and FTL (every version upgrade of this game seems to have advanced the difficulty by a geometric order of magnitude; I beat the game very early, then again when I had to re-install it with the added content, and now I have yet to beat it again on this, my third installation).

I suppose it might be fun to revisit Loderunner on an Apple //e, too, if I ever get the chance. (Green monochrome CRT screens FTW!)

Yeah, the monitors are probably the only reason why should someone build a retro computer. Most of the old games work fine either by themselves or via emulator of some sort. When it comes to monitors however, it's a little more complicated. Low resolutions look bad on LCD displays and that's why a CRT monitor is quite useful when playing older titles. I used a CRT monitor for very long time and nothing can beat its sharpness and color palette in lower resolutions.

You kids are nutz with the CRT FUD. You make them sound like fluoroscopes. If you ever went outside and saw that great radiation spewing orb in the sky you'd have a heart attack. Don't take caution and it'll 100% give you cancer and make you go blind. Just open your door and take a peak (not at the sun!) so I can tell you to get off my lawn. ;)

I have a whole herd of "retro computers". Wouldn't be without them. Mostly I like tinkering with them but they do have strengths. It's become obscure but the Win9x to NT transition broke about a quarter of games. Popular stuff got patched over time but indy stuff not so much. I love dosbox, it's great even on faster retro rigs, but its a loser for demanding DOS games. A Pentium 4 picked out of the garbage and running DOS will destroy dosbox on the best computer in the high resolution modes of games like Blood. More esoteric are the vintage 3D accelerated games using proprietary APIs not called GLIDE that are shit out of luck on modern kit.

My experience with VMs seems to mirror timpu's. I'ved toyed with Virtualbox and VirtualPC and Qemu. They're not useful out of the box for 3D win9x games. I doubt most of the folks who suggest them actually use them for such purposes. I could see a VM with PCI passthrough support and a vintage GPU might do okay but it's a more complicated setup than a dedicated retro computer. One of the great joys of a retro computer is that old software matched to an appropriate machine just works! Screw the patches, screw the deprotects, just put that disc in the drive and you're ready to go!

And it doesn't have to take a lot of space or even use a CRT. One of my favorite machines is a 2001 laptop with a Pentium 3 mobile, Geforce 2 Go gpu, and a sound chip with hardware sound blaster support. Most Win9x games just work, you can slow it down to early pentium speeds for DOS games in actual DOS, or you could boot Win2k/XP/ Linux if you want to be boring. Slow peripherals are a non-issue, SSDs and floppy emulators are popular is such machines these days. You may have to restrain yourself from doing online banking on the moldy web browsers available though. ;)

No FUD here, just facts - the leaded glass was there for a reason. It comes down to engineering and physics, and CRTs had some well known disadvantages from the very start, but one major thing in their favor at the time - they worked... and were relatively cheap to manufacture.

Nobody's saying your eyes would fall out from using one (hell, I have for more than 15 years), but expose yourself to hours on hours of daily use, especially on some of the earlier or poorly built models, and you might be in for a treat down the line.

That being said, I never quite could get myself to glow in the dark after years of using them. All I got were occasional headaches and remnant retinal activity. Eventually I became so upset with my lack of florescence that I switched to "those lousy LCDs" that only shoot unsharpened photons at my retinas and relied on modern upscaling algorithms to recreate the felling of "the good old days" (scan lines included).

But old timers are known for going hard core, so don't let any of us "young lads" talk you out of using them :P.

Compared to this planet, your head and eyeballs don't have a powerful magnetic field and an ozone layer to deflect or absorb incoming particles aimed at them.

The dangers of the radiations of CRT are overly exaggerated.

Having an electron gun fire at a lead mesh = bad... holding a small high power radio to your head = harmless. We're never particularly sane about what is a health hazard and what isn't.

I don't feel the need for it, personally, but I'm not against the idea. If you have the cash and the patience to acquire the parts and the OS, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't make one if you enjoy retro games.. especially since Windows 10 has so many compatibility issues with older games.

It's not that hard to install windows 7 on modern hardware. Mutliboot OS, 7, 10, Linux. Better performance than a VM too.

Depending if you're in California or not.

We're talking about small amounts of radiation that can build up over time, same as frequent air travelers get from hanging out in the upper atmosphere, not nuclear reactor amounts of radiation.

Since a CRT monitor will have included shielding, you can't really argue to anyone that it is a thing you can stare at all day without issues.

Has it been built to deliver acceptable or even less amounts of radiation with average use/viewing distances in mind? Sure. At least those that are well built.

Might as well not worry about all that and use an inherently safe technology, such as LCDs. But wait! We already are :P.

That's the problem, though. There are so many ways Micro$oft could offer proper compatibility with their older OSes, especially given the fact that the retro gaming market is quite large, but they still waste everyone's time. They wonder why so many of us still refuse to move on from 7 altogether. It's because of all of the issues 10 has, including compatibility. But anyways, mini-rant over.

The main issue with installing and running 7 with a dual boot is finding an unused key. They're the complete opposite of cheap, especially for the people who used their 7 key to upgrade to 10. Obviously, pirating is not an option for a person of integrity, so that makes it extremely difficult for people to get a dual boot setup going unless they already had a key for 7 that they didn't use for a 10 upgrade.