I’ve done hardly any game development in my life (making a simple Gamemaker game at high-school in 2016 or 17, & making a box fall in Unity a couple years back; so you can call me a complete noob. But I was just wondering: If I for whatever reason wanted to make my game work natively on a Bunch of different Windows versions, like 95, 98, 98SE, 2000, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 & 11; would that be possible without making separate versions of the game for different Windows versions? It sounds like a cool project for doing just for the fun of it, for learning about the different OS versions once I already have more experience with development on modern Windows. What if I made the game on Godot game engine? Can Godot games even run on such old operating systems? I heard that Windows 2000 and above are NT based, and major Windows versions prior to that ran on something else: would this greatly affect the development process at all?
Clarification: Sorry, but I should have clarified that my development platform is Linux, and would be porting to Windows, which obviously should change the answer to my question drastically; I have no idea why I worded things to sound like I would develop the game on Windows first and foremost; but that was my mistake.
It’s definitely possible if you’re going back to Windows 2000, but I don’t think commercial engines are going to get you there, you’d probably have to use the Win32 api directly (or something like SDL) with a software renderer or a very old version of DirectX. I’m not sure about Windows 95 and 98, it might be possible but I don’t have experience going that far back. I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be possible with Godot 3 or 4, maybe with Godot 2 or older versions if you can still find those online