Can you not just run this in an XP virtual machine?  Getting old games to work on modern OSes can be nearly impossible as code practices were much more loose the further back  you go and many undocumented hooks and tricks can be used the achieve better performance or just out of laziness of the developer.  A lot of this have also been patched out because they caused other security issues. I am sure you know this, but just thought I'd toss it in there.  IMO its not fair to expect a game company to support a game indefinitely.  That said it would be nice if they open sourced old games they no longer support to allow the community to take over for updates as computing evolves.  Online activation is garbage though, and only punishes paying customers.