PC gamers........how do you find older games?

I don't think it is right to expect it to be,it is amazing enough that 20+ year old games can run on modern computers when considering the drastic hardware and software changes that take place over such a massive amount of time,and most of the time there is always a user made patch or instructions how to get the more unpredictable games to work.

Full 100% compat is always an impossibility, and funnily the games you have mentioned work perfectly fine for me on 64 bit Windows 8.1.

If you want to relive Half Life, just download Black Mesa. It's a fan-made remake of the original Half Life. It's really really well-done. If you get physical copies, you might get problems as the versions of such games sold on Steam or GOG tend to have hotfixes pre-applied that allow them to work on modern systems without hassle. If you buy a old physical copy, you're gonna have to apply those fixes yourself (PCGamingWiki is a great tool--ALWAYS look up a game on it beforehand).

@Snugenz Yeah, the GoG and Steam versions of Chaos Theory work without a problem and no longer use the Starforce DRM. The PC version of Chaos Theory is amazing, even coming with native 1080p support in the options menu. The only thing I had to do extra was inject SweetFX's SMAA as the game forces you to choose between Shader Model 3 or AA. Works fine.

Chaos Theory

Black Mesa (Half-Life remake)

Album of Old Games

That issue just sprang up with the game when it went on sale recently. There's an easy fix I found on the Steam forums

1. Go into Control Panel

2. Go to Hardware and Sound

3. Go to Manage Audio Devices

4. Go to the Recording Tab

5. Right Click on the Stereo Mix Device and Select Enable

Easy peesy. Shouldn't have any problems now.