How can I play some older adventure games on windows 10 is there a knack?

Hi Laurie, I moved your question over to our Glitches forum, which is a good place to go when you need technical advice about games.

There is also a thread right here in this forum to help get you started.

If you have questions about specific games, you can ask about them here as well. For older games, it varies whether they run on Windows 10 without complaint, or whether there are additional steps that need to be taken, or whether it might be better to purchase them from a game download site like GOG where older games have been tweaked to run on newer systems.

Hi Marian,thank you for that I will visit sit GOG and see if they can help and what games they may have.

Thank you
Laurie

Let us know if you have questions about a certain game, Laurie.

Yes, what Marian said. It all depends on the game. Many install and play with no tweaking. Other may need to be run in compatibility mode. Really, some place like GOG is your best bet for older games that run on new systems with no issues.

Check the thread Marian linked to.

That will give you an idea of the kind of tweaks some games will need.

Some games work without fussing with them.

Some games work with minimal changes (like Running as Administrator or using Compatibility mode)

Some are a ripe royal pain in the ... to get working.

Some games will never work on 64-bit Windows outside of emulation -- for example a game that uses 16-bit code will not work if you try to run it directly on a 64-bit operating system.

GOG is fine for those games they sell.
There are many games from the 1990's (and even the 2000's and later) that they don't sell though.
Sometimes they can't sell them because of IP restrictions rather than because it's hard to get them running reliably. For example the Discworld games. Pretty much any game supported by ScummVM is easy to get working
https://www.scummvm.org/compatibility/2.1.0/
yet you won't find many of those sold at GOG (outside of Sierra and LucasArts games)