Not looking for solutions here, just some rant therapy after an hour or so wasted.
I recently found an unopened copy of the game "Carrier Command: Gaea Mission" in a cupboard. I think I bought it some years back in somewhere like Morrisons in a bargain software rack, but I really enjoyed playing the original game back in my youth on the Atari ST and wasted many happy hours on that.
The game says it ideally wants Windows 7, a quad core CPU and 4GB of ram which sounded pretty promising that it might run in Windows 10. Could I get it to run? No. I fought all sorts of nonsense in Windows before finally hitting a problem where it seems like the root certificate that the game was signed with was revoked.
Looks like I could buy the game on Steam, but for another £20 I'm not *that* nostalgic. I was briefly tempted to install Windows 7 in a VM, but for a game that might just be wasting more time and it means I have to go find a Windows 7 install disk. With a long list of games I've bought on Steam sales etc but not yet played I've given up, but my already poor opinion of Windows backwards compatibility went down yet again.