benbj2009: I used to play this game along time ago and I wanted to play it again. But now for some reason it's not working anymore and I just bought it. This old games always have this problem or not getting any support anymore Because that will suck if that is happening now.
I think it's unavoidable, especially over a decade or more that backward compatibility will become a problem with some games.
The thing about games being sold as goods is that there is no long term agreement on maintenance with the vendor. This is why personally, I'd be willing to pay some maintenance cost for those games to be properly ported to newer platforms (most likely via an emulation layer as the vast majority of these games are close-sourced).
For this particular game, they are still selling it, so someone is liable to keep the game working on current platforms as long as the game is being sold, though if you are unlucky, at some point, they'll just say something like "yeah, you're right, it no longer works and the game doesn't sell enough for us to maintain it, so we should take it off the store" in which case would-be customers will be protected from a faulty purchase, but you won't be ahead getting that copy you bought years ago working.
I think Windows as a gaming platform is a bad deal if you care about the longevity of your games. We'd be much better off with Linux for that. My personal advice if you want to safeguard the longevity of your games is to start getting comfortable with Linux Windows compatibility layers like Wine.
Ideally, GOG really should be doing that for you (kind of like they did with the Dosbox wrappers for Dos games), but so far, they don't seem to have much interest in this. It appears to be a niche concern for now.
