Windows 8...my baby!
(That's all I got...)
(That's all I got...)
However, for the more common elements, talking simply on games, none of the craft series (such as warcraft, starcraft, etc...even the updated versions which worked under Win7) seem to work. Diablo does not work, Rise of Nations does not work, Star Fleet Command 1, 2, and 3 do not work, arcanum does not work, Conquest frontier wars does not work...in fact anything that was over 7 years old that was compatible or had work arounds to work on Win7 do NOT work. Unless you only utilize programs from the past 5 years...it's most likely not going to work, and when it does it's hit and miss what will or what won't work.
You'd think that with a Win7 base they'd utilize the same backwards compatibility, but no, they didn't.
Part of it is that it appears they strengthened the "anti-piracy" protocols, but in doing so they basically negated many of the older programs and disabled them from working.
I can't speak to all of the games you mentioned, but I pulled out an old copy of Diablo over the weekend and found that it worked just fine in Win8. But you do have to be running as an administrator (it failed from my Guest account that has no permissions). I was also able to get Unreal to run, a couple of other pre-XP games. I think you may just be dealing with permissions issues; the actual compatibility seems perfectly fine. If you'd like to post screen shots of any of the errors you've seen in Diablo (since it's the only one on your list I can test), I'd be happy to take a look and see if I can help you ID the problem.
Frankly, I blame non-conformance with security settings on a publisher, not the OS. But regardless of where you want to place the blame, you can usually override the safety settings without too much difficulty. If you have any problems that can't be overridden by running a program as an Administrator, just turn off the Data Execution Prevention. Details can be found here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Change-Data-Execution-Prevention-settings
Unless you buy it directly from Blizzard (not certain if you still can, but they may sell the NEW copy which runs for Win8 off their site for download, which could be why they disabled ALL older copies with Win8) you shouldn't be able to run an older copy of Diablo at this point.
Starcraft works fine under Windows 7 (64-bit even) after updating the client. There was a minor issue about wrong colours in the loading screen but that was easily fixed (by making a change in the regristry, iirc).Starcraft and other craft games are KNOWN issues with Win7 and would not run, and Diablo had graphical glitches that made it impossible to play on Win7.
Are you absolutely certain you had Diablo working over the weekend.
MS for some reason, instead of building off the Win7 base and utlizing it, instead appear to have closed off the work arounds and disabled any manual patches making it impossible to run an older copy. Unless you buy it directly from Blizzard (not certain if you still can, but they may sell the NEW copy which runs for Win8 off their site for download, which could be why they disabled ALL older copies with Win8) you shouldn't be able to run an older copy of Diablo at this point.
If you can, you probably should inform MS and others...on the otherhand, maybe you shouldn't because MS probably will incorporate that into the next patch to disable however you got it running as well.
If you have an copy of an old Blizzard game, you can register the product key on battle.net, and you can download the latest client from them.
Yes. Absolutely. No patches required. And I'm not the only one:
http://www.norbsoftdev.net/forum/off-topic/52719-working-with-windows-8-operating-system#52729
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3C_f5k9XynY
Not quite. Inbetween they released Windows 7 which fixed the mistakes they made with Vista.They made some bad mistakes with Vista...and they've continued with Win8.