I got side tracked. The original question I wanted to pose:
IF YOU WERE GOING TO BUILD A COMPUTER TO PLAY VINTAGE GAMES, WHAT WINDOWS WOULD YOU USE?
WHAT HARDWARE WOULD YOU USE?
Vintage is extremely subjective but I've been talking people through retro-gaming setups with either Lenovo Thinkcentre 720q Tiny PCs (i3/i5 7th gen Intel) for around $125 or Beelink Ser5 Ryzen 5800u CPUs that cost around $250. Put Batocera Linux on them, which is
basically a front end to RetroPie. Retropie will cover you for anything DOS-era and is a front end for most stand up, console and older personal computers (e.g. Amiga). The older systems can handle PS2 and some Gamecube games while the Beelink can do most PS3 titles and Wii/Switch.
I work with some guys who run a woodworking shop at my local community center to put together bar top arcade cabinets out of MDF for people who can afford the project and otherwise I help people take cast-off laptops or tiny PCs plus cheap gamepads to get to the same place.
You could also use either Bazzite or the official
SteamOS Recovery image to set up a contemporary non-Windows OS that can be made to run lots and lots of stuff either natively or by emulation, with the odd caveat that SteamOS has its best support with AMD hardware. Something like a Ryzen 5600X, Radeon RX 6600 or 5700, 16GB RAM and 1 - 2TB of storage is a pretty sweet spot for 1080p contemporary gaming. There are some down sides to this, since not every game works through Proton and some games, particularly those with anticheat systems like LoL and Valorant, are arguably hostile to running on Linux in the first place. The PC I'm describing is a ~$500 system, something that's very much in line with what Xbox and PS5s cost.
Trying to keep old Windows running well is kind of a pain, especially once your system is so old that mainstream browsers no longer install. Windows versions don't matter very much to me, but given the end date for Windows 10 support, if you want to play contemporary games on Windows, you really have to accept that Windows 11 is going to be part of your life going forward. It'll be a while before Chrome and Firefox stop working on Windows 10 and I'm sure that won't happen the same day Microsoft stops its support, but you can assume it'll happen sooner rather than later. Steam is basically the monoculture of PC gaming, and it is basically a Chromium web browser. The day Chromium isn't getting updates for your Windows OS is the day Steam stops working on it. This is a pretty decent reason to give PC gaming on Linux another look, all on its own.
On another gaming thread, I brought up
ExoDOS project and its various libraries. Depending on how Retro you want to go, the ~11TB of files it has may be relevant to your interests. Since most of the titles there are either DOS or Windows 3.1 games, they'll run on a goddamned potato if you need them to.
You might also want to look at
PCem if you are looking for accurate emulation of specific hardware, if for example you'd like to play Descent on an emulated Pentium 133 with a 3dfx Voodoo and a Gravis Ultrasound instead of just running it in DOSbox like some kind of CHUD.