it wasn't a feature of classic. i was well aware that apple cut classic support (which is another issue)
what is the price of color depth options?
new games are no fun
I understand your points but I really do not agree with you. Macs are not gaming machines, not even for older games (unfortunately, even though the oldest games were the best).
Having realized this after trying out Civ IV on the mac which kept crashing as well as numerous other games, I decided to simply spend some time setting up Boot Camp and Parallels with XP just like I wanted it.
The new Snow Leopard will completely kill off Carbon apps, and then your AoE2 will go down the drain just as well, just like all the classic Blizzard Games as StarCraft and Diablo 2 have done after 10.5.3.
This just made me realized how important and effective Boot Camp and XP really is, seeing as Vista as well doesn't support the older games anymore either. Even better, most PC games are way better supported and older games like Fallout, AoE and StarCraft has a much better modding community than on the Mac.
Software is moving forward and that means cutting some ties with the past, as already noted. I know you argue that it doesn't really cost much to add support for 16 bit (which might be true) but if Apple starts there, who knows what other small things they would also need to add support for (Carbon and Classic to name a few...)? Doing this will end up in the software jam that Microsoft ended up with after Windows 2000...
What I basically am saying to you is: stop your whining, you have plenty of options to play your beloved old games (Boot Camp being one of them).