Play them on an XP machine - or give up W10 completely.
XP is no longer supported.
Hasn’t been for sometime.
I’m sure that you can still play them on an XP machine.
I can’t play ps1 games on my ps4, and I bought them.
They will take my Mahjong from my cold dead hard drive!...................
You do have back up copies, right?
Find them and re-install.
try looking up your games on the windows store. likely you’ll find a number of free versions, and likely a bunch of purchase options
They are all available for free on the WIndows Store.
I’ve had these removed several times by MS updates on Windows 10. I guess they hate them. Search for “Windows 7 Games for Windows 10” and download them — I’ve had to reinstall them several times now.
I lost my default home page after 20 years (Free Republic) and it takes 3 or 4 clicks to pull it up every day. I am slowly moving my favorites from windows to firefox . Enough is enough, and my daughter has worked for MS for 20 years.
Microsoft will tell you that you only leased the rights to the OS. And that the free apps are only there at their good graces.
Same happened to me when I went from Windows 7 to 10. Lost a lot of good applications, and win-10 cannot decide if I am in the USA or Norway.
restore them from a backup or xp machine, rename them to something else like game1,game2 ... or use 7zip and keep them in a zipped file and run them from there.
In early versions of Windows 10, there were various compatibility modes where you could run legacy apps that weren’t happy with the regular settings. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s been maintained.
Check out “compatibility mode.”
I know its an aggravation, but maybe there’s an easy workaround.
So I just checked. In the latest version of W10, there is a “compatibility troubleshooter”, which you can access either from control panel, or the search function on the task bar.
I don't blame you one bit. This "perpetually belongs to Microsoft" crap is why I dumped them for linux and I have not looked back or missed it one bit. Best thing I ever did and I should have done it much sooner. The MS chain and ball is gone forever. You can also get a freecell clone for linux for free.
But if you want to stick with MS they have a free freecell download for Win 10... But I know that is not the point here. MS and the Win 10 concept has upset a LOT of people.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/freecell-collection-free/9wzdncrdn9kt
Windows X - as in your ex-software.
But this is well known.
By the way, those weren’t “YOUR” games anyway, they were Microsoft’s. Regardless of what you paid for them, the EULA still applies, and what Microsoft gives, Microsoft can take away, or modify. Try finding Windows Movie Maker, which was a perfectly useful piece of software but which was retired and even if you find an old copy, will not longer run under Windows 10 because they intentionally disabled support for it.
Go search for “PySol Games” - you will find several versions and while no longer being supported this is Free Open Source software distributed under GNU General Public License and contains thousands of card and related games, including hundreds of Mahjongg games, all of which put Microsoft’s to shame.
The solution is not to get mad at Microsoft for being the arrogant bastards they have always been, but to find ways of working around them to do what you want to do.