Patrick
Alien Attitude.
Couldn't you create a VM with an older version of Win 7 or even WinXP or something? I have a bunch of older games -- some never opened -- that I will attempt to get working through a VM (especially since I am Mac based).
An Apple or Linux machine VM host wouldn't necessarily have the same issue. A Windows 7 VM as currently patched would in any format. If you use Windows 10 as the host for your VM, then the problem would still be there as the OS handles the request and does not allow the VM to pass through to the hardware directly. Another reason Windows Hyper V (Microsoft's Virtual Machine manager) couldn't accept VM's from previous VM managers. I actually had a Windows 98 VM on the machine to run other games. Can't use it on Hyper V without a complete rebuild of the VM, but since the VM can't directly address the hardware, there isn't any point.
Problem wouldn't affect an WinXP in any form except in the case of using Hyper V on a Windows 10 machine. The more I do this the less I like Windows 10, but since the business world is using it....
I have 2 Mac's I support on my network. So I'm not a Windows vs. Mac, Ford vs. Chevy, Pepsi vs. Coke type person. The hardware since the loss of the PowerPC processors is exactly the same between a PC and MAC. I ran 64-bit applications on IBM R/S 6000's with the same chipset for years and thought it was a superior processor for what it needed to do.