I think you maybe just need to pick free to play games that are more reliable? Like I don't know what the things you are talking about are. According to the previous thread, just play old games that you can only get on a platform that is known to be reliable like GOG or Steam and you won't have to worry about random virus's.
This. It should generally only be a problem if you are doing something outside of the normal commercial channels, and based on your general reluctance and paranoia about such things, I'm surprised that you are going outside of those outlets.
The thing is I actually haven't done abandonware in a few years and that was not my problem.
for instance Eduke32 and OpenRCT2 are actually ports of older games that let you run Duke Nukem 3D, and Roller Coaster Tycoon on newer windows operating systems. For example without OpenRCT2 roller coaster tycoon simply just will not run on either Windows 7 and most definitely not Windows 10, without crashing at startup
The vanilla versions of a lot older PC games (even with steam) will not run. again once you play them for a while
I read the steam forums too. People complained that when they first played it it worked fine. but like me if you try to get into (on a different day or night) RCT2 either by disc or steam the game starts crashing at startup at random times
turns out I did some research and found that OpenRCT2 and Eduke32 are both malware programs, and pardon my language OpenRCT2 is the only way to run properly roller coaster tycoon both 1 or 2 on Windows 10 and someone fucked it up leaving me and everybody else screwed
this malware that comes with these programs and changes the default icon and does unnoticeable damage to anyone computer. eventually locking you out of the game
(edit) as for eduke32 it works fine but eventually turns itself into malware after a few months of having it on your harddrive, according to most every anti-virus program
