I've still got a (final ever?) working DT on my XP machine, from a prior period when I knew I had to not kust tale the standard download, I think (it's a while ago, I've slept since!). It's my generally offline PC[1] so what works keeps on working unless I actively do enough to break it.
When I get back to that particular machine (at the weekend) I'll have to check what versions of everything I think I have. It may have involved Windows patching (or maybe taken advantage of some auxilliary .dlls/whatever I had to use to solve a related issue with something else), but that might take more effort to establish.
I will of course bemoan that someone/several someones (
upstream of Clément) has made the conscious decision to needlessly drop backwards compatibility (and/or make it necessary to jump through many awkward hoops to re-establish it). The last time I had to look explicitly at this problem (for someone else) it turned out to be an attempt to grab a non-XP system call that wasn't even supposed to be used (lazy compiling/linking process, outwith the obvious control of the programmer).
Not that I expect everything to be fully 8086-compatible[2], but it's Windows-executable encapsulation that is the big problem, and you can never predict what they will do with that
even if they tell you their plans.
Maybe (and I've resisted this on my example of this legacy equipment, so far) the solution is to dual-boot[4] to a Linux build. Yes, there's a lot of 64bit-only/default distros you need to steer round (assuming it isn't 64 bit hardware, despite the XPness) or try to find the right legacy build that's not
differently bad in terms of required dependencies, whether you go for a build or package or whatever from there on in.
[1] My online stuff, on my own equipment, tends to be either Raspberry Pi or Android, neither of which (easily!) run DF anyway, so the fact DT is at least as hard to run on each, respectively, has never been an issue I ever decided to try to solve.
[2] Oh, ok then, make it MMX-era/586, for the pipelin8ng bonus though DF never
really needs anything other than integer operations, when you look at it.
[3]
Nvm[4] Containerising/OS-within-OS is probably a worse idea without a more modern system with the more current possibilities already built in. I imagine the slowdown of using something like a Cygwin environment would be worst-of-all-worlds in many ways[5]. And if you can run WSL then you're on a system where you wouldn't need to!
[5] Ironically, I used to run Windows DF on Linux via WINE, a lot, in my early days with DF. I dread to think how inefficient that was, but that was the better hardware at the time - though dual-booted with XP I was mostly booting to Fedora for everything else - and I don't even know if a native Linux build/package/semi-source was available for DF. It was definitely long before DT would have had to have been factored into the equation.