Me, Personally? I have a Pentium 3 desktop running Windows 98, with a GeForce 4 video card. It's also got a Sound Blaster 16 video card. I consider it my machine to cover an era from the 80s to about 2002, when I can't run the software anywhere else. Actually, I mentioned that machine in my last post.

An example piece of software: Rayman 2. I had trouble running it under Windows XP, 7, and Wine in Linux. It won't run in a VM because it requires (I think) DirectX 7 and hardware acceleration. It's a flawed example, though: it's had a few re-releases, including a compatibility fix by GOG for modern Windows versions.

A more recent example: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. It'll run on more recent versions of Windows, but has trouble with having over 2GB of RAM (or was it 4?) available. Some lovely group logged the system calls and developed a binary patch to allow it to run on modern systems. This illustrates another option: banding together as a community and doing what the publisher won't (or can't).

A lot of the posts in this thread (including yours) seem to elevate convenience to the level of a technical requirement. At some high-90s percentage of coverage, that isn't a problem for old software. Every once in a while though, you have to do the inconvenient thing.