If single player is enough for you, just crack it.

You can use old build of the game (2187) from 2004, which you can find on the internet and in my case works flawlessly.

Thanks for your replies, I think I'll try to research on what can be done while using my original retail disc version then. Thanks

I have Steam running in my Athlon XP, with that being said source games cannot run on my system anymore because they get and error of a dll, my guess is that the dll use some instruction that is not present on Athlon XP instruction set.

Source engine now requires SSE2 compatible CPU. That's why I'm recommending to use that older version, which I linked in my previous post.

.legaCy wrote:

I have Steam running in my Athlon XP, with that being said source games cannot run on my system anymore because they get and error of a dll, my guess is that the dll use some instruction that is not present on Athlon XP instruction set.

In theory with your Athlon XP machine, you could enable steam offline mode before january and therefore your steam games would still work as long as you didn't attempt to go online again after that?

what I'm thinking is:

*I intall XP on my rig,
*Install Steam and create an account,
*Buy Half life 2 and install (disc or digital version),
*let game update fully.
*enable steam offline mode
*confirm game is working fine offline.
*remain in offline mode and don't connect to internet again on that xp machine.

In theory when january rolls around and that computer is not connected to the internet, there should be no reason for the game to stop working or require going back online despite Steam being disabled for XP. I know it's sounds bizzare, but that might create a preserved legit installation of Half Life 2 on XP (which would be nice to do as kind of gaming archival thing).
I could then clone the hard drive to preserve that working setup indefinitely.

Ah, turns out offline mode only works for a couple weeks, never mind.

The problem with updating HL2 now, is that you get a much more demanding version of the game, especially with older cards from 2004-2005.

I'm not even sure, that current version of the game supports DX7 or maybe even DX8 render path. Also, HDR is globally enabled, so even if some lower render path exist, performance would be much worse, as Fusion said. Not even talking again about SSE2 requirement, which rule out anything pre-P4 and pre-Athlon 64 from the start.

Srandista wrote:

I'm not even sure, that current version of the game supports DX7 or maybe even DX8 render path. Also, HDR is globally enabled, so even if some lower render path exist, performance would be much worse, as Fusion said. Not even talking again about SSE2 requirement, which rule out anything pre-P4 and pre-Athlon 64 from the start.

Yeah, I think you're both right. It might be a bit of a lost cause. I'll have to just play it on a modern operating system. Would've been nice to have on an xp machine alongside Doom 3 and Quake 4, but alas never mind.

I had the same problems. As Srandista pointed out, the patched version of Steam works perfectly on pre-SSE2 processors. Of course, there is always a chance that Steam blocks older versions of Steam from connecting eventually.
In fact, not knowing about the special version of Steam in time made me switch from an Athlon XP 2800+ setup to a Pentium 4 3GHz with SSE2 support for my Windows 98/XP rig. Although, in retrospect the P4 is a better machine as it has a superior chipset and supports Hyperthreading, so no loss there.