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I think you’re missing the compost part. Wood will break down in a compost, yet you can build houses from it. Indoor furniture made from wood will happily serve you for decades. Same with this biodegradable plastic: It’ll have a shelf life of decades or even centuries. When shredded and composted it will break down. This material is likely not a good candidate for the wheel housing on your car, but there’s no reason not to use it, for example, for a car’s interior.

It’s almost criminal to share those photos in such low resolution as OP did. His insta is a better source for the pictures: https://www.instagram.com/deanmason.wow/?hl=en

Don’t.

What people here are saying: Don’t try to enter the dimension of suffering and pain.

What you are saying: OK. How can I enter the dimension of suffering and pain?

If you insist on entering the dimension of suffering and pain: Go a step further back and develop your game for DOS. Older Windows versions will just be able to run it out of the box, and everything else can run it via DOSBox.

I think using OpenGL will be even harder than DX8. Your point with the documentation is spot on: it will be hard to come by. As for TLS/SSL third party libs: I had the fun opportunity to implement/maintain the backwards compatibility for a piece of software for Win XP/Server 2003 ~3 years ago. We had to jump some hoops with a custom compilation of OpenSSL to get the parts of TLS 1.2 we needed in Windows 10. I can say with confidence, that that route is a dead end for even older Windows versions.

Little add-on: My gut feeling is that you’ll need to set up a development environment on Windows 98/Me or NT4/2k, maybe XP.

If you use plain C and only the part of the Win32 API that has been availlable since 95 that should be doable. No modern toolkit/SDK will likely enable you to do that. The problem will be finding downloads/sources for OS, SDK, and IDE old enough to target Windows 95. You might be able to use DirectX 8, but it will require installing DirectX 9 on newer versions of Windows as a dependency (DX10+ is not backwards compatible with DX8 and DX8 is the latest you get for Windows 95, DX9 is still availlable for Windows 11). Your game will have to be offline only or rely on insecure network stack because hardware old enough to run 95 does not have CPU instruction sets required by implementations for modern SSL.

would this greatly affect the development process at all?

Well, take the information I provided and have a guess ;-)

No USB passthrough in VirtualBox without the extension pack. And unless you have a paid version it is a license violation to use the extension pack in a commercial setting. Take that with a grain of salt: it’s from the top of my head and it has been a while (years) since I touched VirtualBox. Since you are concerned about privacy, I’d suggest not touching closed proprietary software, like VirtualBox, at all whenever possible. Luckily, for virtualization in linux, that is perfectly possible. What you will want to look at is kvm/qemu. And maybe a handy UI to that like (qt-) virt-manager or gnome Boxes.