Would GoG make a Virtual pc setup for games made for win95 and onward for better compatibility?

And also have separate settings+drivers for games that run a bit wobbly.

For games like Black and white 1+2

Black and White runs on Windows 10 once you've patched it to he latest version, removed the DRM and run it through the DGVoodoo2 wrapper (not sure if the wrapper is needed, but I'm using it).

[edit] - I know this because I started a replay of it last weekend!

Regarding the Virtual PC setup, the big challenge is that effectively they would be selling both the game and a Windows 95 licence (assuming Microsoft let them do that) - it would probably be prohibitively expensive.

You would probably have to look to the fan community for stuff like that. I own 6 Windows games from back in the day and I use community made wrappers and/or source ports made by fans to play them on modern hardware.

As has been suggested, that could be a complexity nightmare.

And due to the likes of emulators like DOSBox etc not really necessary in many cases. Though you appear to be out of luck with Black & White, especially as DOSBox is mostly for DOS based games.

https://www.dosbox.com/

https://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?letter=B

A virtual PC would be more of an overhead than an emulator. But in reality, it would be better to boot into a designed PC environment, a Games OS. However, that would be no minor undertaking to develop, as it would essentially be creating some cutback form of a Windows OS.

One could imagine some such future where GOG release their own console.

Black & White: You're quite insane; even attempts at a source port (see on Github for Openblack) are struggling due to the insanity.

But as another poster suggested, there are patches that manage to get it running somehow.

Why would GOG do any of that? Their goal is to get older games to run on modern day OSes with minimal tweaks not to emulate older OSes.

If you're interested in Win9x emulation have a look at DOSBox-X. But of course they don't provide the OS as well, just the environment you can install it on and emulation of the hardware devices it needs.

whats the point?

They want the games to run on win10 atm probably this will be the supported os for years.
So if you want to play the gog games just get win10, easy.

I imagine it would be better if they helped finance Wine.

Would Wine for Windows be entirely redundant? I know Microsoft puts a lot of effort in being backwards compatible but they are not perfect.

Is that not what winevdm or otvdm does? Or is that just a way to get the depreciated functionality of WoW32 into x64 Windows?

I have no idea. Last Windows I installed was XP.

Given that otvdm is obsolete, and that Wine offers other advantages over a small component, probably.

Working in IT and knowing licensing costs..
It would cost GOG an arm and a leg to do this OR they would need to pass the costs onto its users and it would not be cheap.

Seems unlikely. GOG sells games, not "self made" software utilities.

Well, there was that game released with BoxedWine recently...