windows 8 not compatible wth older games?

i love to play my old star wars games but recently got a new laptop with windows 8. so i go to play one of my older games and get the following message: cannot start or run due to incompatibility with 64-bit versions of windows.
is there anything i can do about this to continue playing the old games i love on my new laptop?

I doubt your OS is 64bit
I have win 8.1 64bit and its incompatible with old games , as well as win 7 64bit
I played every game on 8.1 32bit when I was having it as Recoil 1998
you can get them work on 32bit windows but 64bit is incompatible ( especially giving Video adapter error) , Good luk

Windows x64 can't run in 16 bit mode, in those old games, made for XP (which most people used as 32 bit) could be at least one part in 16 bit and obviously can't run.