@Pisarz
Good luck, hope you can get it working.

I noticed a few extra benefits of dgVoodoo that make it worth using on earlier versions of Windows as well - with it installed Machines is displayed in 32-bit colour mode instead of 16-bit, and you can force bilinear/trilinear texture filtering for all textures (through the dgVoodooSetup utility).

Comparison images (ignore FRAPS counter):
Native DirectX
dgVoodoo

32-bit colour massively improves the appearance of terrain and sky textures (especially darker colours / at night) by reducing banding.
Forced texture filtering reduces the jagged appearance of distant / angled textures and smooths over certain textures which Machines usually renders with nearest-neighbour sampling. This causes slight distortion of some transparent textures (e.g. autocannon turret barrels) and parts of the interface. I think the trade-off is worth it - especially if someone makes higher-resolution versions of the affected transparent textures (which would reduce the visible distortion).

NOTE: If you use dgVoodoo 2 2.55 or later with forced texture filtering, set the "Videocard" under the DirectX tab to one of the GeForce cards to avoid pink outlines on some transparent textures (gun barrels, etc.)

Ok.So I installed machines on my Windows 10 laptop and have the fps issues. Downloaded the voodoo thing and now the game runs fine, but there are no textures...

Ok, I think we can now safely conclude that the original Machines Wired for War is definitely not future-proof. For anyone who may not have seen it, I believe that the creator of the Machinima series "Freeman's Mind" released an episode of his "Game Dungeon" covering a game called Dungeon Siege. In the episode, one of the most important quotes early on that came to mind on this topic was:

"This is another one of those weird games where a system from ten years ago runs it better than a modern one does today... Stuff like this is why I always get paranoid about changing an OS. This sort of thing ALWAYS happens with a new operating system. Sometimes there are fixes, sometimes you're screwed. It's also why I sometimes feel like punching people who think NEW software is always better. Doesn't matter what it breaks; it's new!"

Link to the video:

So yeah, it looks like I'm hyped for OpenMachines as that will bring the compatibility back to Windows 10, instead of waiting for it to arrive. Regardless, I'm sticking with windows 7 for a while.

@Mordakai95
Press the "S" ;)
http://www.machinesthegame.co.uk/

Don't worry, we'll rebuild Eden 4:

wow m123, I wasn't able to play the game since the screen would constantly flicker but that really fixed the problem!

@nainnad said:

wow m123, I wasn't able to play the game since the screen would constantly flicker but that really fixed the problem!

Glad it helped :-)

dgVoodoo was updated last month, might be worth trying the new version 2.5 if the previous one didn't work for you.
May improve performance compared to 2.45.

EDIT: version 2.51 released, bugfixes and some new features

@Mordakai95 said:

Dungeon Siege.

...aaand now I'm playing it again >_>

Complex shadows annihilate my framerate just like in the video.
Simple shadows? 120 FPS+ (Vsync on, 8x MSAA)
Complex? 20 - 60 FPS (relatively smooth with just the player character on-screen, becomes much worse with enemies or multiple party members) :-/

Another game with a weird graphical OS compatibility problem is Far Cry - apparently land water reflections don't render on operating systems newer than Windows XP, so only trees, objects and buildings are reflected.

I had pink artifacts on my Win 10 system, but the DGvoodoo fix above worked for me. Now I have a fully working brilliant game!

@M123 Thanks for the update!

Solved my problem! I applied the compatibility mode for Windos 98, but with one of the new .dll files. Now the game runs almost smooth (perfect gameplay).

@M123 You are the man, this worked for me. Ive waited years to play this game again. Thank you so much.