Can you play old computer games on new computers?

There are several options for installing old games on newer computers. A common problem is that 16-bit games do not run on 64-bit computers. One option may be to install a 32-bit operating system. If that is unfeasible, then there are still other options.

Some of the 16-bit games have 32-bit versions. For instance, if you play Doom, Doom 2, Hexen, Heretic, Duke Nukem 3D and similar, there are 3rd-party game engines. So you can install an alternative game engine and copy in your genuine game files and use the 3rd-party game engine to play the game files. Good Ole Games is a company that takes some of the older classics from MS-DOS days and converts them to 32-bit Windows versions. So from them, you can get things like Beneath a Steel Sky, Kingpin: Life of Crime, and all of the Police Academy games.

Another option is to install an emulator program. DOS Box is one example. It will give you a 16-bit compatible DOS command line window where you can run many of the old 16-bit compatible programs, including games. Not everything will work, and there may be some performance issues, but it is still a handy program. There are other emulators as well.

There are also emulators for other platforms. For instance, there are emulators for most of the older gaming consoles, and even older computers like TI 99/4A, Atari 800, etc. To use the console emulators, you would need the cartridge binaries. Some people have extracted the cartridge code and copied it to PC files, and if you have a compatible console emulator, you can run it. Of course, if you download such cartridge binary dump files, you do need to have the rights to use it. Downloading a binary of a cartridge game you already own is legal, but downloading a game you never owned (or have transferred to another) is not.