I think the people who you've been talking to have been taking something to cause those psychedelic colours (actually it's usually just you have too many colours all you do is set the palate to 256/high colour in compatability options)
And stuttering sound? please tell me a game this happens in I'd love to find one.
Or just install a virtual machine and then you can play your win98 games in win98!

Well, there are now, but unfortunately 3D acceleration is a bitch. I had some reports that it's getting better but I've yet to confirm this.

Also, I've been having some major stability issues with virtualizing Win98. that was years ago, hopefully it's been fixed by now.

Actually, I'd like to know if there is someone here more informed about the recent advances in the field?

Virtual machine support has been making progress, but mostly in areas other than graphics. Most of the advances have been in using virtual machines as servers on big-iron hardware.

Parallels is the only software vendor that has put significant effort into doing 3D graphics really well in a virtual machine environment. Their Desktop (consumer-friendly price) and Workstation Extreme (expensive: business and pro only) products have the best graphics support on the market.

You need a Mac with a decent graphics setup to get any benefit from Parallels.

Yeah, you should be saving money for a real OS instead of that decade old claptrap. Seriously. It's 2012 now. GOG work on the principal of making games work with modern OS. if you're still using obsolete crap anyway then of course you don't need GOG. Just regress a bit further and you can run those Win 95 games on their intended OS.

On a related note, Windows 8 Consumer Preview is out on the 29th of this month. And there has been no official word on when testing for Windows 8 will begin. :|

Interesting. I'm still in two minds about this one. But ultimately I think that it will require a Windows 7 to its Vista. Or maybe just a service pack. But even after Win 7 I'm not expecting them to get this one right first time.

It seems too... mobile device orientated for my tastes. I know that's the way things are going. But it doesn't change the fact that its relevance to me is hampered by that.

That even kavazovangel is critical about it makes me really nervous ;-). Windows 7 is running excellent, so I see no need to upgrade just now. Let's see how it works out.

?
256 is not high colour. I'm pretty sure changing the amount of colours was one of the first things I've tried. It is a common problem for many popular older games like Starcraft and Age of Empires II on Windows Seven\Vista. The solution for Age of Empires II was to make a shortcut with some commands in it, but it took me some time to find out which type of commands to use, since they have changed from the earlier versions of Windows.

Starcraft was easier but I probably used a hour or two to fix it.

The windows version of Heroes of Might and Magic II.

Not if you want to play a 3d game or if you don't want your 800 X 600 game to cover just the center 800 X 600 pixels of the screen. That at least has been my experience with Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. Maybe there are some Virtual Machine software that is better for playing games by now? You should probably not expect problem free gaming however.

I know that Windows Seven is the system for the nearest future (unless windows 8 adds something useful) but for some people XP is the best solution right now. Or maybe it is just me.

people are still using WXP?!? what, did i just time travel?!?

GoG should stop supporting a decade-old OS and focus on W7 (and possibly W8) compatibility. XP compatibility is just a waste of time and resource which would be better spent on supporting up-to-date and upcoming OS.

According to:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

As of january 2012:

Win7 - 47.1%
Vista - 4.7%
Win2003 - 0.7%
WinXP - 31.4%
Linux - 4.9%
Mac - 9.0%
Mobile - 1.3%
----
And for aficionados of old games I would think that XP was more common than in general.

Yeah, I'm in the same position I was with XP when Vista was released - looks a bit crap (and drastically overpriced), I don't need to upgrade. So why bother? For the record, I have used Vista. It's not terrible but I'm certainly glad it was a work computer and not something I tried to run games on.

Windows 7 passed Windows XP in desktop share only about 6 months ago, and there are a lot of desktops out there that will continue to run Windows XP until they become doorstops.

Nobody should be criticizing other users for continuing to use an OS that still works pretty damn well, or criticizing vendors for continuing to provide software that is supported on it.

That's what you get for trying to use that thing. Get VirtualBox - it doesn't have hardware accelerated 3D for Win98 (no VM solution has, as far as I know), but run XP (or possibly 2000) in there and you should have a nicer experience.

Thankyou. I will be trying this the next time I try virtual machines. Can you play non-widescreen games without getting the graphics stretched to wide-screen out on your wide-screen monitor?

I made the shift from WinXP to Win7 some time ago, and to be perfectly frank I regret it. Any pretense that Win7 is somehow more stable than XP is outright wrong. I hate the Vista/7 start menu. I hate the way that it uses up system resources unnecessarily and tries to nanny me through everything I do. I've shut down UAC because, quite frankly, it was pissing me off no end. I hate the absolutely useless file search function and the needlessly convoluted control panel.

Anything good? Well, I can play Just Cause 2 now. That's about it.