pouët.net

And I can think of one particular group who has had to provide a download of a specific dll . . .

Other than that, not much, Win10 is better than Win7 ... its just I have some stuff running always and my machine can be on without rebooting for months :P

I stand corrected. Not over a decade, but almost a decade. It's 9 years old.

Just drag the exe over http://www.dependencywalker.com/ and you get a list of dlls it depends on.

... which, of course, doesn't work with <= 8k intros at all, and I'm not sure about 64k either. Even "proper" demos might use LoadLibrary() for some stuff instead of plain DLL imports. For these reasons, Dependency Walking is quite useless. Starting the demo and looking which DLLs it has loaded at runtime is much more reliable, but for this, you need to be able to run the demo successfully to begin with ... a catch-22.

Dependency walker has a profiling mode, it should detect any dll loaded or attempted to load by LoadLibrary then.

It tends to bork with .net/native mixed mode stuff, though.

check? check! ^^
Go for 10. In case this is a non-ds-forum, someone could also write: browse to the good old /dxwebsetup.exe/ you already should have somewhere else or download it, give it WAN-rights via the build-in firewall (web search...) and run it.
When there will be an issue trying to install Net3.0 via the Windows component-selection, because you need it to run some odd games or something like that, don't panic - you did all right. Bravo and welcome to 10! Now mount your ISO or plug in your USB-stick holding the installer-files. All you need is already here. Open a shell as admin and type, I mean paste, this line into it, then press enter:
Dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx3 /All /Source:X:\Sources\sxs /LimitAccess
replace X with your source-drive
In my case I need to go often quickly into the old control panel. Therefore I use a desktop RC-menu entry. The public tools I know are doing this on top of the menu or just not the way I like it. So if you wanna try it too, to have this special coolish Windows 7, 8, 8.1-feeling:
-------------------------------------
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell\ControlPanel]
"MUIVerb"="Control Panel"
"Icon"=hex(2):25,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,52,00,6f,00,6f,00,74,\
00,25,00,5c,00,73,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,00,73,00,\
68,00,65,00,6c,00,6c,00,33,00,32,00,2e,00,64,00,6c,00,6c,00,2c,00,32,00,31,\
00,00,00
"Position"="Bottom"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell\ControlPanel\command]
@=hex(2):22,00,25,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,52,00,6f,00,6f,00,74,\
00,25,00,5c,00,73,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,00,63,00,\
6f,00,6e,00,74,00,72,00,6f,00,6c,00,2e,00,65,00,78,00,65,00,22,00,00,00
-------------------------------------
In all other cases of a beginning mainström-blabla disease: Remember the past and do it the same. It's still just Windows! Same company! You need to slap it. Without you get slapped. BTW it is no big thing to install as many retro-OSs and multiple instances to one PC or as much PCs your space makes possible. Never think if someone says install 10 she, he or it dislikes or likes 7. Modern hardware is 'so damn fast', Windows is installed in one hour or even much less time after some try-outs. So if you need special runtime-versions, get you lazy ass up and search for it! We have this thing called Internet today. just my little helper-demon... writing this text took longer than rebuilding the lost partition's file table I just found on an eSATA-drive to c&p the /lame content/ to the reply... -_-

I'm actually flabbergasted this thread hasn't deteriorated into GIF spam yet!

Go ahead. You know you want to. Just because I was jaded just then about the place where jaded sceners go to die.

Never change a running system. My W7 is running smooth here. I dont have the time or energy to deal with problems/surprises if I would upgrade.

So far I very likely will switch when Microsoft stops providing security upgrades or my system blows up for some reason.

sometimes a demo maded for Win3.11 become a rare outstanding prod

no way, as for win3.11 only text quests and superultramultimedacrap can be good :)

Hmmm, I think good old D3D9 should work out of the box even on Windows 10 fresh install. What's missing is D3D9X utility libs... can somone correct me if I'm wrong?

So copy any d3d9x shit into app directory and call it a day :-D

Correct, you're wrong. A fresh Windows 10 install doesn't have d3dx. You would need to install the directx sdk from June 2010.
There are d3d9 intros using d3dx, and there are some that don't. It depends.
That's why it's becoming more and more discouraged to use d3dx at all. Even microsoft deprecated it.

As I said, d3d9x is missing.

I checked my old stuff (around 2002/2003) on Win7 on my girlfriends machine - fun fact, runs all flawless. I haven't expected the S!P music disc to run... D3D8 or so. The uncompressed exe from the 4K is working too. Holy. Microsoft is the king of backward compatibility. I wish I had 16:9 in my head back in the days. Epileptiker deserves it. Time to test on my on Win 10 machine later that night...

Machine is two R9 290X Crossfire... yes, she likes a flawless Diablo 3 experience. A so-called D3 nazi. If the machine is turned on, the light flickers in the neighbourhood :-/

Ditto. Why change if the PC is stable.

Depends on what gif you want. I can, but im not sure if this thread is ready for it yet :)