Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon 2 is still the best railroad game and runs great on modern Windows versions, it's now nearly 30 years old:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/7620/Railroad_Tycoon_II_P...

I return to that game for a few quick sessions every couple of months.

> Who actually runs unmaintained abandonware?

Personal computers are for persons. They don't view their use of their own systems through the lens of an imputed purity test.

> I would rather prefer OS devs not wasting time maintaining legacy cruft and evolve with the times.

Then don't support those who do with your dollars. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the market shows it disagrees with you.

I play Silent Hunter III which was released in 2005. Also Half-Life sometimes. Everything older is going to be console games.

Businesses run the old stuff.

Is this sarcasm? Some of my favorite games are 20 years old. Windows is popular in a lot of manufacturing spaces because the equipment software doesn't get updated and only connects to old programs over 16 bit serial ports.

There's a whole world out there of legacy software that is happily churning along, and doesn't need to be updated.

Okay, but then you could also keep it running on an old OS. Fork out the money for a RHEL license, and just never upgrade.

But I don't want to run a separate machine with 15, 20, 25 year old hardware to keep that OS working.

I still play Total Annihilation, from 1997.

Great game.

Lots of embedded stuff will have control software that's very old.

People object to this approach, but Apple does this, and they seem to be doing fine.