On the other hand digital media is still a bit easier to preserve than analog, maybe someday someone will design some sort of special software that will be able to emulate any sort of past OS and every old PC game will be preserved forever, who knows.

2.) I’m keeping digital backups of my CD/DVD/Steam games on my storage hard drive.
I experienced firsthand what it is to be in a situation where your Internet connection is not stable/fast enough for Steam to work (Steam is *much* more capricious in that regard than other download services), and you never know when you might end up in that situation again (or if Steam has issues on their side).
And well, keeping backups of everything digital you even slightly care about is just good policy (and as you said, optical drives tend to disappear these days – though you can always buy an external drive).

3.) Oh, the horrors of Windows XP DOS SoundBlaster emulation…

4.) Yeah, the real issue is the early Windows games, especially 3D ones (Will we have the same issue in 20 years with early “Tiles” software made for “Windows”RT?).
The only games I have trouble running in Windows 7 are Dungeon Keeper 2 (which is so bugged, even after GoG did their pass over it, that depending on which features you want to break less, you have to use 3 mutually exclusive patches) and Space Empires 5 (a 2006 game, but which is seemingly reliant on an old DirectX standard that Vista and later Windows ended up emulating, which is greatly slowing down the game when nested screens are involved).
And since they’re 3D, emulating them or running them in a virtual machine isn’t a viable option (so far?).

Oh, and there’s also the funny situation of Microprose’s (Sid Meier’s) Magic The Gathering (1997?), which has a terrific community which greatly expanded the game – http://www.slightlymagic.net, but which, while being a 32-bit game, still uses a 16-bit installer – that doesn’t work on 64-bit Windows!

But then, so far it’s just about convenience of running everything on the same system – it’s not too hard, after all to dual-boot Windows 98 or XP on a old hard drive (though I wonder if it’s still going to be possible to do that once UEFI is generalized).

Also, it would seem that Windows 8 Pro and even more Windows 10 come with some new virtualization options, so in some cases running older games might become *easier*.

5.) “The flexibility of the PC platform means that code incompatibility can usually be resolved if you invest enough time and effort”
But as evidenced by the removal of LAN play from Dawn of War 1 and Homeworld 1, it would seem that the companies aren’t willing to invest that effort.
I just hope that as GoG took a hard stance on game DRM, they will also take a hard stance on refusing games that have multiplayer but don’t allow direct IP connection.

6.) There *is* a permanent solution :
Part A – reverting copyright terms to a saner duration (the original “14 years after release” seems to be also economically better, if some economists are to be believed), not to mention that, as you said, software get obsolete faster than other works of art.
Part B – require (commercial-only?) software to leave their source code in government’s safekeeping until then.
The Part B will prevent the kinds of situations we had recently like with Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (1998, barely 17 years!) of game source code (and art assets?) seemingly being “lost”, so that not only the “remastered” version has been released without the expansion packs (which makes it almost useless considering the huge amount of modding that was done on the game afterwards that assumed the mod user had the expansions), but it would seem that instead of using the original high quality 3D renders turned into (low-quality) sprites and render them into higher quality sprites, they had to redraw all the sprites. By hand. :facepalm:

Good article – thanks for the trip!