Some general questions on playing older games in Win 7

Please excuse the rookie-like questions but I've only had Win 7 for a few days. My first new home PC in quite a while..I had a stack of older games I wanted to play and had a few questions.

1. From this list, which games, if any, might be unplayable or uninstallable on Win 7, maybe don't even bother: (Fallout 3, Deus Ex Invis Wars, Unreal 2, Halflife 2, Battlestations Midway and Pacific, Battlefield 1942, MOH Airborne, Sacred, Elder Scrolls 4, Neverwinter Nights 2, Far Cry 2)..sorry, as I say, it's been several years and the games have been stacking up..I had heard so many stories on Vista and chose to wait for Win 7!

2. When trying to tweak, for games that simply don't install and run fine in Win 7, I assume its best to install manually via setup exe file and not to autoinstall?

3. I have no experience when it comes to using win 7's compatibility program. To install and/or run an older program in Vista mode, does the compatibility program automatically give you that choice or do you manually have to bring up that option and select to install it (or run it) in Vista mode?

Sorry for the neophyte questions and for being out of the gaming loop for so long. Always enjoyed Fallout/Diablo/Everquest/MOH type games and would love to find similar new games for the future, especially games going forward that don't need tweaks!

Why can I play both Diablo II and Fable: The Lost Chapters without problems when they are not compatible? I tried Sacred II too, no problems.

SledgeDG said:

Because the list is not properly compiled through empiric data but crudely thrown together which essentially renders it utterly useless.
If there are games on the "not compatible" list (like Diablo II)that work just fine, you can safely assume that there are also games on the "compatible" list that will short out on your rig.
so just another waste of valuable internet space ;D

-DG

So helpful that list seems to be. Thanks

I am playing Sanitarium on my father's laptop from time to time. I believe it was made about 1998 and it requires DirectX 5. Have had some easy-to-fix issues but in compatible mode for Windows 95 it launches without problems. It seems that a lot of the old stuff is compatible with Windows 7 -- you should be able to run almost everything effortlessly.