I have a large collection of DOS games and other games that can only be played on either devices intentionally kept ancient or various emulators, and while I see any number of retro consoles in the Platform list, everything from DOS to Windows 10 falls under PC/Windows. It would be nice if I could designate my DOS or Win9x games as such. It would also make it easier to tell them from their more recent siblings in the case of long-running product lines that don't change the name.

This is a great idea! I could see this implemented as "new platforms" or potentially how digital games are handled here. I.e., where you can designate a game as being owned via Steam or PSN or what have you.

Whatever ends up happening there will need to be a list compiled of Windows versions to choose from. MS DOS, Windows 3.0, 95, 98, XP, 7, 10 are the ones that stand out the most to me personally, though there were probably some games out there that required Vista or ME to run :(. We could use the terms Win3x (3.0, 3.1, etc) and Win9x (95, 98) but I'm not sure if those would make sense to everyone. Then again, I'd rather classify games as 9x than specify between 95 and 98 given the heavy overlap between them.... Grrr. Well, just throwing thoughts out there!

I think pretty much anyone still trying to keep old games alive will understand Win3x or Win9x, as that's how we usually refer to them in old game forums. :-) There are very few games that ran on 95 but not on 98, and I think 9x with a note would cover those. The idea is mostly to designate which kind of emulation is likely to be needed, rather than to nail it down hard. At the moment, most Win3x games can be run in DOS mode, thus DOSbox. Win9x games run on SCUMMVM if you're lucky, or require a Win9x virtual machine if you're not. I'm not sure beyond that, as I personally haven't run into anything that couldn't be made to play nicely with use of Compatibility modes. I am willing to research when there were windows changes that marked new eras in gaming compatibility, if that helps.

It gets a little more confusing when you figure out that Steam and GOG basically run a lot of old games using emulators (more obviously on GOG games, less so on Steam), which affects how you can tweak or interact with them.

Regarding long-running product lines: We've been making a point of indicating the game's release date (or platform/publisher in some cases) in the game's name to help differentiate and clearly identify games with the same name, but different releases.

ie:

• Tomb Raider (1996) vs Tomb Raider (2013)
• Ghostbusters (NES) vs Ghostbusters (GameBoy)

If there are any titles where an older name can be confused with a newer one, let us know, and we can modify the title in some way to help differentiate between them!

As for being able to identify older PC games from newer ones more easily, I like the idea but the issue is that the PC games library, as a whole, is pretty darned gigantic. By simplifying things to the simple catch-all, it makes life far more manageable for the curators as it's one less thing we need to research and verify when updating a game's details.

It is worth discussing though, as maybe there's a way to make it happen that doesn't impact the workload too greatly.

From the admin/curator side of things, a couple of things come to mind.

1) Splitting PC/Windows as a platform into MS-DOS, Win3.x, Win9x, Win7+ is not too feasible. Would require moho_00 to wipe pretty much everything we've all done regarding any PC release information so far.
2) Adding some kind of sub field (like Marcus mentioned) where curators could specify additional OS information when doing admin work could serve but again, requires going back and updating a lot of entries on top of being more work going forward. (I'm imagining something similar to when you add a physical release to your collection and a number of checkboxes appear so we could indicate MS-DOS, Win3.x, etc...)

Conversely, we can leave it up to users to indicate via tags in their own collection which operating systems a game is playable on. The downside of course, is that tags are personal and don't propagate across the site for all users to see in some way.

I can see how changing a standing field could be a logistical nightmare. I think the extra fields would be a good step that would be less nightmarish. Tagging would definitely be less work for the curators, but could mean even more duplicated work for users, due to the non-propagation of tags. Not sure what the best answer is on this, but I figured I would mention it and see what happens.

I am not the kind of person who will do filing day in and day out, but I do cyclically come back to things I like. If that's okay, I would be fine with being a person who goes through existing entries refining the current PC/Windows into smaller sub-categories. I think the additional checkboxes might be the most manageable way to do that.