about modding older programs

[sydetys]

I am posting here ´cos I am newbie, and this is about GENERAL thingy.

I just bought cheap Win XP X64 and tossed old 32bit XP away.

I installed and tried several older games, few refused to run.

Now I know WOW64 should be able to run 32bit code. And those few run good with 32bit XP..so the problem is compatibility with 64 bit OS...even 64bit vista refuses to run THOSE games.

My question is:
Is there easy way to uncompile..."do something" and recompile installer.exe, main exe or if necessary ALL files?
and after that even older programs would run with win XP x64?
What would be that "do something"?

I doubt silly file HEADER editing solves this problem.

thanx

BTW if this requires some skill in programming I think this would be good time for me to learn, I just got Visual Studio 6 version 2008 so that would be my 1st choice for programming

[sydetys]

no I know what I want, I gooogled and found answer:

"Cross-compiling"

I can do it with Visual Studio, but does anyone have
easy instructions how to use compiler?

Main goal would be this for starters:

I have a file: Launcher.exe, which can be run only with 32bit XP.

I must recompile (cross-compile) it with Visual Studio 6 (edition 2008) so that it can be run with WOW64 under 64 bit XP as 32bit program.

How is it done?

thanx

BTW for mods: if this is off topic in this forum, feel free to move it to right place.