When I plug a USB disk drive into my Windows 10 PC and install the old game off of the CD, generally it works fine still even on Windows 10 for me. I do not know if my computer is somehow special and I got lucky, or if all Windows 10 machines work like that, but I think they would all work.
The harder thing for you to do is if you want to play a version newer than what is on your CD, but older than Reforged. In order to play an intermediate version like that, you will have to choose what type of version you are looking for. The last patch released prior to the Activision merge in 2008-2009 was the Patch 1.22 that removed the requirement to insert the CD to play the game. If you were playing solo, you could consider that version, but a major security exploit was found with it that would allow script code from within a custom Warcraft III map file to run itself as administrator on your computer outside of the Warcraft III game and take over the computer in a way that looks like it was the Warcraft III game doing it so it wouldn't alert your virus protection of your PC.
So, around the year 2009, this forced Activision Blizzard's hand after the merger and they created Patch 1.23 to Patch 1.26 as some quick bugfixes to the game that basically didn't change anything meaningful other than eliminating some of the support for some of the custom maps because they used a wide cut when trying to remove anything related to the security exploit, and it affected non-malicious user code in a bunch of custom maps.
After that, from 2011 to 2017 the players used the Patch 1.26 and the game probably had its longest lifespan of stability, but in 2017 someone on the Hive found a workaround to bring back the exact same security exploit from Patch 1.22 and below. Probably because of that, and also because they were secretly developing Reforged, at that time Blizzard came back and started doing things. So, the Reforged team created Patch 1.27 to test the waters (it's basically identical to Patch 1.26 for 99.9% of use cases) and then created the patches after it. In general:
- Patch 1.28: changed some stuff in the game but not much that would probably affect you
- Patch 1.29: added new art to the game for drawing a 16:9 user interface that was being made by the Reforged team at the time. This allows you to play the game on newer monitors and it makes the game widescreen instead of stretched. The additional art around the edges of the screen wasn't invented until this patch, so if you use an older one the only way to get 16:9 resolution is with a decompiled hacked version of the game that fixes the 3d game world to be widescreen even though the game's buttons are still stretched generally. But on this patch, the widescreen just works out of the box. This patch also changed the game to have up to 24 players instead of up to 12 players and added the first iteration on custom (to be Reforged) modding APIs, and this patch dramatically changed the layout of some of the game's stored data so that there was not repeat data between Reign of Chaos and the Frozen Throne, but moreso just one install that would be switching versions
- Patch 1.30: by this patch, the entire game store was in the networked format that was generally invented to only work for the live client and for Reforged, although since it still works offline there are still backups of it on hive I think. they encrypted the network traffic to kill off bots, which means you probably can't easily get this version to play on a 3rd party game server past this point. this patch added more reforged modding APIs to the game scripts
- Patch 1.31: this patch had in the patch notes that it was literally "the last version before Reforged" or something like that. Their team added the Reforged modding apis into it even though it has the old game's menu, so you kind of get the best of both worlds other than the fact that it has more DRM, so now that blizzard turned off the servers for this version you probably cannot play online. You could still do LAN and single player though, so people use this version for Custom Campaign sometimes. Also on this version, the entire game engine supports a dual-mode setting where a map can either run in the old 2002 game scripts for its triggers, or you can replace all of the maps triggers and inner workings with Lua scripts and the game engine would run that using all the Reforged-based upgrades. The game's internal data is also basically stored in the Reforged structuring and layout on this version, even though it doesn't have the stuff in Reforged that broke the game to not work like the half-baked skin system and all the new models which changed the format of the old models because of bad/lazy programming. Other than that, this version was basically like everything good from Reforged without all the stuff people don't like (such as the Web Menu) mostly. Without any hacks outside the game, just as a standard Map File, someone was able to send me a multiplayer map of MineCraft that they created on this version with the new modding APIs that were intended to be for Reforged. That would have been impossible on the older game versions, unless you live in China where people decompile them or whatever.
So basically there's this spectrum of versions and people probably don't agree what to use is what I'm trying to say.
Some people on Hive uploaded all these versions so I guess you can use that:
Below are lists of WC3 installation and patch downloads. Please don't share any cracked or otherwise manipulated files. This list is only intended for people who already own the game, you still need a CD-key! 1.01c 1.04c 1.10 TFT: 1.20a; 1.20e 1.23a 1.28.0; 1.28.1; 1.28.2; 1.28.3; 1.28.4...
www.hiveworkshop.com
If you are security paranoid, there's a download from BLIZZARD ITSELF somewhere in there -- at least for English (I do not know about Italian). As far as I know, there is like 1 last backup server at Blizzard that lets you download Patch 1.27 which would probably feel like "the old warcraft" for you in every single way. But also, that version would be stretched on any monitor today because it is not widescreen compatible. If it isn't stretched, the other possibility is that it would have black bars on the side of the screen.
