crazy_dave: I think a WINE for Windows or something like it will be developed eventually. I hadn't thought about the ARM processors with old games when making my statement originally, but that is indeed another reason to have such a project beyond simply the march of time rendering old code incompatible. If there is a real need left unmet by for-pay companies, there will probably be an open source community to fill it. :) There is that "ReactOS" project, but that's a full OS and while an interesting project, it's not quite the solution to this problem.
Though I'm on a Mac myself, a Wine for Windows similar to DosBox is a nice idea anyway. While I might appreciate the irony, I'm not sure I'd like the future for old games and GOG if only Linux and OS X had compatibility with old Windows games.
Wine itself doesn't do any hardware emulation, and as such only runs x86 Windows software on x86-compatible hardware (I believe there was a project to add emulation so it could be used on OS X for PowerPC, but they never got anywhere before Apple switched to x86). As Windows itself (on x86[-64]) becomes less and less compatible with older software, Wine might very well get ported to Windows though.
