20 year old software - how to make work?

Imagine I'm an idiot.

But, I found some software in my basement that would make my life better.  It's from back in the day when we buy the disks and not rent the use of the software.  So it's pretty cool.

Except it works on Windows 98, XP, or 2000

How do I get that to work on my windows machine 23 years later?  Can we still make a 'shell' for the software to run in?

I miss DOS!  

There is a good chance it will still work.
You should still be able to spawn a terminal:
(not tested: https://allthings.how/how-to-open-command-prompt-in-windows-11/)

If not, you can run it in a virtual machine.

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
https://archive.org/details/windows2000vdi

"DosBox" is a free DOS emulator that's widely used to run old classic computer games on today's systems. Works fine on all Windows systems including Windows 11.

DosBox

You are not an idiot. What is idiotic is constant change of operating systems, software and throw away of perfectly good and capable machines to some dumpsite. Change mostly for the sake of change, "progress".
Bloat and more bloat and then stupid developers accepting the bloat to make more bloat. I refuse to play this game at home and I have an old laptop with XP Pro with my favorite AutoCAD 2002 and other software that works like a dream. I don't like newer versions, because they are not so responsive and I simply do not need them. What I have can do 10 times more that I need.
99% of people could use software from the 90s. Exception is to use the latest film editing and rendering applications, bit what percentage of users really need it - probably the remaining 1 percent.
As far as Virtual Machines are concerned, I tried XP VM on Win 7 and it was completely unacceptable. It was extremely slow on a super fast hardware. Maybe newer ones are better, but I doubt - who would put an effort to make it better?.
I'm going to buy another XP laptop as a backup. Modern laptops I use for work only.

If the host computer has hardware virtualization support (which all modern computers have), it is fast.
I use virtual machines from time to time and it runs fine.
There are even some people who have their work "machines" in a virtual machine.

Sebastian Köln wrote:There is a good chance it will still work.
You should still be able to spawn a terminal:
(not tested: https://allthings.how/how-to-open-command-prompt-in-windows-11/)

If not, you can run it in a virtual machine.

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
https://archive.org/details/windows2000vdi

I second setting up a virtual machine running the OS you need.