Calling something "an old PC game" hides an enormous amount of variation. The term spans hardware generations, operating environments and compatibility requirements different enough that treating "PC" as one platform badly undersells the real picture.
DOS Was Not Windows
Games built for MS-DOS ran directly against hardware in ways that later Windows-targeted titles increasingly did not, a shift explored in Windows 95 and 98 Games. A title's actual target environment affects everything from expected memory configuration to how well it runs today.
"PC" Also Meant Amiga, and Others
Home computer platforms competed directly with IBM-compatible PCs throughout much of this era, running many of the same genres, sometimes the same titles, on meaningfully different chipsets. The platform listings treat these as genuinely distinct entities rather than folding everything into a single "computer" bucket.
Why This Distinction Matters for Compatibility
A visitor trying to actually run an old game today needs to know which specific platform and operating environment it targeted, since compatibility layers and emulators are built around specific hardware behavior, not a generic idea of "old computer software." Getting the platform field wrong on a catalogue entry can send someone down the wrong technical path entirely.
Browsing as a Discovery Tool
Filtering by platform surfaces patterns a plain search never would — which genres a specific machine excelled at, which years a platform was most active, which publishers favored it. See What Makes a Good Old PC Games Database for how platform data fits into the broader structural picture.
