I know the games, but I lost touch with the finer details of the computers years ago – I couldn't hold down my job and at the same time keep up with such a fast-developing field as computers turned out to be.The advice that I received from experts I trust was that for games, changing the compatibility might help, but you couldn't trust it completely. Games programmers try to wring the last ounce of performance out of the machines, and almost always make use of borderline machine capabilities which are poorly documented or not documented at all. I used them myself back in the days of MS-DOS. All I can say is that Mok's patches were designed to help MM6-8 to run more reliably under the XP operating system. They weren't quite 100% – we did come across a couple of people that the patches didn't help – but they were damn' good.
So I would guess that a Mok-patched game combined with XP compatibility would probably give you the best chance of running the games, but I can't guarantee it'll work.
As computers advance, they get further and further away from the operating systems these games were designed to run under. For example, I still have the discs to install a Win98 operating system (which is what most of the later MM games were designed to run under), but I can't install Win98 at all on my current equipment. That's why I've kept some of my old boxes. I still dig out my vintage 1999 laptop occasionally to run MM6-8 on a fully compatible machine – it's the only computer I've got which will still let me find all the treasures hidden in these games.
