and that's something desperately needed?

Not as easy for graphically demanding games, but web browsers have been able to run a full VM in a browser for years now. Slap the game on it and call it a day: https://retroonline.net/Windows/Pharaoh%20%26%20Cleopatra

Now, please vibecode me a winxp directx driver that serializes calls to its wasm counterpart, to enable graphics acceleration for such VMs. Sounds highly doable: virgl, virtio-gpu and Venus exist. Might be even simpler to do it for Vulkan and port dxvk to XP.

The communities playing old games did not need or want versions playable in the browser, they're already playing the games on emulators, source ports, or with community patches for modern systems.

It was possible, devs were just sleeping on WASM. What the LLMs are doing with this shit is trivial that you literally could do in a day by hand. Literally all of the hard work is already done for you/the LLM by the people who implemented C-to-WASM compilation.

Check out Mandalore Gaming's older videos. Most of the time he picked old titles and his videos contained segments about which mods and patches to install alongside to make them work better for modern hardware/OS.