Reading some of this thread is hard. The idea of using modern hardware/software at all already gives me chills but to use it for doing something that an older computer is BUILT TO DO?!?!? I couldn't. My Windows 2000 PC is my friend in all computer things I do. I use Windows 7 rarely for some stupid google "apps" but that's it.
I have no problem at all with that. Back in the old days, it wasn't uncommon to develop games using a higher end system than the target platform. For example, the game studios that could afford it, used the, at that time, ultra expensive 386 and 486 computers, just for making life easier as they could compile the code several times faster than the target machines. They could also use Local Area Networks for communicating different computers, so a computer could compile the code while another one could test it. If something went wrong, only the target machine would crash, so it could save a lot of time.
They also could take advantage of a more user friendly (and time saving...) graphic environments such as Windows 386 or 3.0, or, at a later time, even Next machines, as ID software did while making Doom. ID Software then threw away their Next computers and used Windows NT for the next projects, being targeted for DOS. Just as we do now with DosBox and PCem, they could have several independent DOS windows instances. I my opinion, Windows 10 is not very different, at all, to Windows NT 4.0. In fact, the program I use for graphics, Macromedia Fireworks 8.0, I think it works on NT 4.0.
For example, my project is meant to be playable on the average home PCs that were already at homes or could be bought on the fourth quarter of 1990. They weren't 386 or 486, just because they were very, very expensive, so the average PC owner (as my father and I were at the time) could afford an 8088, 8086 or, in a few cases, a 286.
To develop my project on the real hardware of the time, I would need two 386 machines for developing and compiling, and an 8088 or 8086 machine for testing, equipped with a few graphic cards for testing or, even better, using a card able to emulate several graphic cards, as the OAK VGA OTI-037, that I had at that time. That makes three big computers with their heavy and bulky CRT monitors, plus a composite monitor, o an NTSC television. I also would need to set up a LAN, with a hub, network cards and those RJ cables around my house (my wife would throw me out of the house, LOL). Yes, I could do all the development on one machine but it would be desperately slow. Slow compiling, and slow testing as I would exit the development environment (Turbo C++ for my project), because there would not be enough memory left, and run the result. Loading the TC again, and so on...
Now I just can the advantages of having all those developing computers, plus some extras, in a small and convenient space.