But you can still Install them right? Just not run them without a NoCD Patch?

This decision was made by Microsoft in response to security concerns

Who plays 2003 games? 😀

I still play games from the 90s on todays PCs, and actually went and rebought them on GoG. Yes, it costs a few quid more, but eventually it saves you all that drm hassle... and for a game that I've been playing since the late 90s (Master of Orion II 😀), I don't mind paying a bit more because of the endless hours of enjoyable playtime I got out of it.

GoG is nice for that 🙂 but you can get dosbox and scummVM and make them work too if you have a floppy disk W10 still handle floppy btw.

As Dan said perfectly from Valve: "We think Vulkan is the future. Unless you're aggressive enough to be shipping a DirectX 12 game this year, I would argue that there's really not much reason to ever create a DirectX 12 back-end for your game. The reason for that, is that Vulkan will cover you on Windows 10 on the same class of hardware, and so much more from these other platforms."

And when people complained about that when these BS DRMs were new, it was brushed off.

The sooner gaming moves away from Microsoft and DX the better. Who the hell are Microsoft to say you cant play your games that you bought? Hopefully the joint venture will see us rid of the atrocity that is DX As Dan said perfectly from Valve: "We think Vulkan is the future. Unless you're aggressive enough to be shipping a DirectX 12 game this year, I would argue that there's really not much reason to ever create a DirectX 12 back-end for your game. The reason for that, is that Vulkan will cover you on Windows 10 on the same class of hardware, and so much more from these other platforms." https://youtu.be/quNsdYfWXfM

The sooner gaming moves away from Microsoft and DX the better. Who the hell are Microsoft to say you cant play your games that you bought? Hopefully the joint venture will see us rid of the atrocity that is DX As Dan said perfectly from Valve: "We think Vulkan is the future. Unless you're aggressive enough to be shipping a DirectX 12 game this year, I would argue that there's really not much reason to ever create a DirectX 12 back-end for your game. The reason for that, is that Vulkan will cover you on Windows 10 on the same class of hardware, and so much more from these other platforms." https://youtu.be/quNsdYfWXfM

DX is not DRM. Vulkan is great but it is still OpenGL and therefore takes a lot more effort to code for. That is the main reason we do not see as many OpenGL games, MS makes DX very very easy to work with and that means less time spent coding. Valve takes ages to make games. They don't mind spending the time because they have Steam as their main income. So Vulkan makes perfect sense for them. They get greater flexibility because Vulkan is more robust than DX12. But for developers that release games regularly as their main income, time is money and DX makes more sense. Not to mention that DX12 support on the XB1 means less effort spent on multi-platform games.

The sooner gaming moves away from Microsoft and DX the better. Who the hell are Microsoft to say you cant play your games that you bought? Hopefully the joint venture will see us rid of the atrocity that is DX As Dan said perfectly from Valve: "We think Vulkan is the future. Unless you're aggressive enough to be shipping a DirectX 12 game this year, I would argue that there's really not much reason to ever create a DirectX 12 back-end for your game. The reason for that, is that Vulkan will cover you on Windows 10 on the same class of hardware, and so much more from these other platforms." https://youtu.be/quNsdYfWXfM

Isn't Vulkan more Mantle than OpenGL?

No. Vulkan is the successor to OpenGL. It requires a card that supports OpenGL ES 3.1 or 4.x with a driver update to add the Vulcan support. AMD worked with both the Khronos Group on Vulkan and Microsoft on DX12. That is why there are many similarities in the feature sets between them and Mantle.