PC

The EFFing List
Games that were made ten years ago can still be played on PCs today. This means the list of what /v/ recommends is fucking huge. So we broke it up into eras: the days of MS-DOS, the days of Windows 95/XP, and the most recent days of Windows Vista/7. If your computer was built in a later era, it can play games from an earlier era with some tweaking instead of needing a full emulator.

MS-DOS games (1988-1995)
Games published up to around 1992~1995, when Windows finally started wearing big-boy pants.
 * most of the games were moved to their own page: Low end computer games

Windows 95/XP games (1995-2006)
Windows 95 finally became more than just a wrapper around MS-DOS. XP was a big upgrade; some people wish Microsoft stopped there.

Windows Vista/7/8 (2006-onward)
2006 onward, as Microsoft continues to "improve" their operating system into looking like the twinkle-toes fairy crap on Macintoshes. If you haven't upgraded yet, skip Vista and go right to version 7. Version 8 isn't out yet, just screenshots of what looks like a box of Jolly Ranchers having a mosh pit on your desktop.

Still, it's not like you're gonna play an FPS without mouse and keyboard, or an RTS without a mouse. Get serious.

Graphical Troubleshooting for Vista and Windows 7 users
Chances are, you own either Windows Vista or Windows 7 and you want to play some of the games on this list. Most of these games are old games, and unless you bought them from GOG you might have one trouble that is easy to solve. This issue fucks up some colors in some of these old games, turning them into a fucked up color scheme. It was believed to be a GPU issue, but it's not, apparently. Because there's a very easy method to solve this. We'll be using Starcraft: Brood War as an example. Now, let's try and launch the game.

As you can see, the colors are completely messed up. It's not as severe in the screenshot, but apparently taking a screenshot changes some of the colors in the image, making them even more fucked up. Just think of it as a rainbow which doesn't influence the game much, but is pretty damn uncomfortable to have around. How do we solve this? First thing first, right click on the Starcraft icon on your desktop or in the program list and go to Compability.

Check the boxes that make you: Run the Program as Administrator, compability mode - Windows XP Service Pack 2, Disable visual themes and Disable desktop composition. Click OK. Now, here comes the essential part.

As shown above, right click on an empty part of your desktop and click on Screen Resolution. Just like that. The menu should come up.

Now, without closing OR HIDING the window, click on Start and launch Brood War from your program list. And you're done! Everything should look great. Can't include screenshots, though, because they're still fucked up, even if on your monitor it looks perfectly normal. Now, go play those games you thought you couldn't enjoy on a newer system! man

OR IF YOU CAN'T BE FUCKED DOING ALL THAT: OPEN THE GAME, PRESS CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, CLOSE THE "explorer.exe" PROCESS AND YOU ARE GOOD

OR BETTER YET IN THE MIDDLE OF THOSE TWO ON HUGE LAZY FAGGOT METER DO THIS

Make a notepad file

'taskkill /f /IM explorer.exe C:\"Program Files (x86)"\"StarCraft"\"Starcraft.exe" start explorer.exe '

Save as Starcraft.bat

Replace middle line with wherever your starcraft file is.

This works for AoE, Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds and a bunch of older games.

OpenGL games may crash on nVidia cards
Some games that use OpenGL renderer like Anachronox may crash immediately on modern cards/drivers. It seems to help to modify "Extension limit" parameter, whatever it could mean. First, go to regular nVidia control panel and create new profile for game's exe file. You may want to also set antialiasing and vsync while you're there. Next, get the latest nVidia Inspector, go to driver settings, select your game profile, click "Show unknown settings" (magnifying glass) and set "Extension limit" under Common to 0x000011A8 (pick from dropdown list to not to screw up). That's it.