Most emulators are free software and work on Linux and have worked for a long time. As Android and Raspberry Pis have become quite popular as emulation systems, the free software emulators, which are easily portable to these ARM+Linux system, have taken off as the most popular emulators in general. Anything that’s also available on Android or RetroPie will work on Linux for sure. There’s an emulator for every popular console that works on Linux about as well as it does on Windows.

DOS games you can run in DOSbox. Pretty sure compatibility is 100%. This is also how e.g. GOG makes these games run on Windows, because modern Windows can’t run these games either without emulation.

As for old Windows games, it is worth trying Wine, the Windows compatibly layer. Volunteers have successfully been trying to get games (especially games actually!) to run on Linux since the 90s. Twenty-something years ago I was gaming on Linux playing Starcraft, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 and god knows what. Anecdotally, some old Windows games that no longer run on Windows will work fine in Wine. A prominent example is The Sims 2. There’s a video out there of some millennial Sims streamer and housewife instructing her thousands of viewers on how to install Linux in order to get that game to run better.

Steam comes with a version of Wine, called Proton, so 90%+ percent of games on Steam run somewhere between fine and perfectly fine. Not everything though, you should check on protondb.com.

Playing in a VM is a terrible idea btw, the performance will suck. You don’t need to and don’t want to do that.

If you’re fine fiddling and tinkering, Lutris for Linux has been able to run a few things from Windows that I wanted to play… so far Transformers: Devastation, Planescape Torment, and Space Rangers have all run like a champ. Its a bit odd to get a game installed. Its like WINE but with less terminal style commands.

Dosbox works like a champ and lots of abandonware dos games have been repackaged in their own dosbox wrapper.

Retroarch is … a thing that can sometimes work for console games. Its… a chore to use.

and then run windows in a virtual machine to play some games?

Other people covered what you can do more or less, but I’m going to spend a moment being an annoying nerd about terminology.

A virtual machine is essentially a full system emulator. It emulates a full PC, the CPU, memory, BIOS/UEFI firmware, along with various bits of hardware like a USB bus, mouse and keyboard, VGA display, SATA disks, a network interface, etc. You install a real copy of Microsoft Windows (or other operating systems) onto it. It has the greatest compatibility with Windows software, but usually the lowest performance and integration.

Most modern CPUs have built-in support for virtualization, so we’re not talking orders of magnitude slower, but graphics performance in particular will be very limited because Windows will be using a VGA driver* with no acceleration. Some virtual graphics “hardware,” like Spice, have Windows divers available, but the performance (while better) is still rather limited. These mostly provide convenience features like dynamically changing the size of the guest display when you resize the VM window.

The most common way Windows software is run on other operating systems is with compatibility layers like WINE (if ports are not available). These load Windows PE executables as native processes and implement various Windows APIs with much better desktop integration. Instead of being trapped inside an emulated VGA display, the Win32 / MFC / .NET APIs used to create a window will actually create a native window, receive native input events, share the clipboard, access the same filesystem, etc. Network connections are established directly without emulating an entire fake PCI network card. Graphics APIs like DirectX, OpenGL, and Vulkan are implemented on top of the native graphics stack and enjoy full performance, instead of being bottle-necked by a software VGA driver going through something akin to VNC.

use wine instead, it lets you run windows software without a vm

Decades spent on the puter

chances are you’ve already benefited from collectively owned software and haven’t even realized it (silicon valley loves piggy backing open source)! Using a libre operating system just means taking onus of that fact and using it for your own ends from top to bottom. Really it’s just a gateway to being being even cooler.

windows in a virtual machine to play some games?

While this is possible. Chances are that most of your games are already playable through Valve’s efforts with proton. You can use apps like bottles to run them or just use Valve’s Steam client itself. Linux is nowhere near the state it was in only half a decade ago.

I can tell you from experience that I have been able to play modded fallout new vegas on Linux with mod organizer 2, so you just need to give it a shot. Protondb is a community database for games and there are always people willing to share their experiences on getting it to work with linux.

How about for emulators like duckstation and pcsx2?

Both are supported nearly on every Linux distribution. If you install Linux Mint, it’s as easy as going to the software center and downloading them from there.

How old is your abandonware?

• DOS - DOSBox works on Linux, it’ll be exactly the same

• Early windows / win32 - WINE works incredibly well, you just install it and then it can run Windows. File menus will end up a bit goofy because they try to point you at My Documents instead of ~

• Early 2000s compatibility dead zone - There’s like a 60% chance it still works on Windows and a 70% chance it works on Linux through WINE.

• Post dead zone - WINE works incredibly well again.

• Modern games and Steam games - Proton works incredibly well and you’ll barely notice you’re using it.