I know this is probably a dead point, but I also have a passion for restoring and "daily driving" older hardware, but am not super tech savvy. I just want to recommend linux mint. works great and you can even still surf the web on a 15 year old laptop. the 32 bit iso I use is HERE, and oRCT2 works fine for me. no crazy tech stuff. a lot of linux distributions can get a little technical in the install process, but mint is designed for ease of use. Just use a free program called Rufus to make a bootable USB or burn the iso to a CD. It picks up drivers and everything.
That said, I too would love to play it actually in XP
