Yeah, I always liked 2000 - it was basically XP without the fischer price skin. Although the version I had did have problems with large (over 160GB) hard drives.

Windows 7 is still my OS of choice; I'm hoping 9 will basically be 7 but with native support for higher end hardware.

And don't forget bringing back a choice of start menus without using a third party program. I want a sane start menu choice and not that monstrosity that is in 8.

I actually bought the game to try that (I liked it originally anyway) and it runs just fine, without zero fiddling.

That's all rather vague. Personally, I play a lot of oldies and found no big difference between the two - in fact, I think I didn't find a single game that refused to run with no workaround. I'd still like some concrete examples so I can investigate them.

Then I honestly don't see the problem. Is your IDE running in Metro mode or something? :) Besides, if you're targeting that server in 99% of the cases you can do just that, run the app on the server and collect the logs remotely if needed.

That's not really how it works. I'm not going to go into details about my work, but I do development and configuration in various GUI tools for a specific customer at the moment, and it all takes place on one of their servers.

Running it in a glide wrapper made the scrolling much smoother, so it seems we can scratch Diablo 2 off the list of games incompatible with Win8, it just requires a little tweaking. Thanks again! :)

But now I remember another game that appears to be incompatible to Win8, namely Still Life. I only get a black screen when I run it. This GOG user reports that the support staff said it was incompatible to Win8, too, but suggests a workaround using a virtual machine with WinXP or 7 as OS. Sounds pretty complicated though, unless I misunderstand what a virtual machine is. Would this require owning and installing the OS in question?

I also stumbled across this list of GOG games supposedly incompatible to Win8 for reference. It's more than a year old, so it might not be up to date in all cases. It would be interesting to hear from someone who tested a few of them on Win8.

Yes.

Yeah, then it's as I feared, complicated. Anyway, I just got Still Life to run on Win8, too, but only by applying the inofficial (and probably illegal) Vista patch. The patch I downloaded was in French, and luckily my installation of Still Life is, too. No idea if it would work on all language versions.

Just throwing out some ideas of what might happen. Take this with half a kilo of salt and grain.

This year:

-Windows Phone 8.1 announced at Build. = includes an almost complete subset of Windows Runtime ported to WP.
-Windows Runtime for Xbox One announced at Build. = includes a subset of Windows Runtime ported to Xbox One.
-Windows 8.1 Update 1 announced at Build. = improves compatibility of Windows Runtime with the versions soon to be found on WP and XO.
-Devs have one account to manage for making Windows and Windows Phone apps. Soon, they will have another for -Xbox One, which would in the near future be merged in to the first one, to reduce redundancy.
-A unified Store announced for Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox One apps.

Further down the line for Windows 9's release:

-Windows 9 announced = further improving Windows Runtime.
-Windows ARM replaces Windows Phone and includes exact Windows Runtime distribution as the x86 version.
-XO soon receives update to properly support the new features of Windows Runtime.
-C# 6.0 is released, along with the next Visual Studio, and cloud based compilation of things Visual Studio Online vNext or whatever they call it (awesomeness as awesome as it can get).
-Surface 3 or 4 is released (2 has been selling quite good, hard to find it in stock most of the times).
-New system-level programming language is officially announced, bringing the productivity and ease of use of C# and the performance of C++ (they are already working on this).

And one can only dream, the unified Store is also compatible with XO.

You might want to try installing ReactOS in a VM, it aims to be Windows XP/2003 compatible (and while some parts are based on Wine, the OS is not Linux/Unix based, but made to mirror Windows as much as possible, so I believe it's more compatible than Wine), and while it's not a 100% Windows replacement yet, it might be worth a try for software that won't work well on more recent Windows versions.

EDIT: not you personally, you already have a solution that works for you, but one idea for others.

Dream windows 9 = as light and fast as XP, as simple and elegant as 7

current solution - windows 7 lite :P

Srsly, i don't find use for almost 70% of the crap the vanilla windows come with, thank god for lite versions...

It is certainly possible GOG has fixed it later, just like they should. I still have it installed on Windows 8, so I'll try this:

- See whether the current installation still fails to run.
- See if it is possible to run it with e.g. running the exe directly, as someone suggested
- Uninstall it, and download&install again the latest GOG version, whether it works this time.

I don't think there was anything vague about the Gothic example. I read about it earlier (from Arkose, I think), and faced the same issue last June when I installed Gothic on Windows 8. But I also found the instructions how to overcome the issue, which worked for me.

Again, it may be possible GOG has fixed that too afterwards (ie. applied those workarounds needed in Windows 8).

GOG's updated installer is signed October 11, 2013 so it was posted somewhere around then. I installed this one on Windows 8.1 and it works perfectly.

GOG have updated the installers for Gothic, Gothic II and some other games with the fullscreen border issue.

Sheesh, yeah. Windows XP lasted 5 years. :P