Old games on newer systems

I seem to be having a problem playing many of my older games on my system. I always get an error like "unbale to initialise graphics" or "could not find suitable video device! your video device doesn't provide at least 800x600x16 texture format 4444".I'm sure there are more error messages than that but those are the ones I've gotten.

I'm trying to play a game from JoWood called "The Nations" but i can't :/ I tried with a virtual machine but I still get a message saying "unable to initialise graphics". Do any of you guys have a solution for this?

Gpu: Xfx Radeon 6970HD

Cpu: Amd Phenom x6 1055t 2,8ghz

Not really a solution but: a lot of older games are unable to recognise newer hardware; this is probably down to your harddware being far too high speced than the game designers had initially anticipated. For example whenever  go to play my old copy of black and white 2 it doesn't recognise my graphics card and puts everything on minnimum setting, although my graphics card can max it at 60fps easily

I was afraid that would be the problem :/ 

Use radeon pro utility and spoof an older gen graphics card Id?

I can't remember what game I needed that for but I just remember it working perfectly.