Steam's also transitioning towards 64-bit binaries right now. Lots of bugs in the beta however (steamwebhelper at fault. thanks google)

leileilol wrote:

Steam's also transitioning towards 64-bit binaries right now. Lots of bugs in the beta however (steamwebhelper at fault. thanks google)

Funny... They had an x64 Steam client years ago, and also an x64 version of the Source Engine, which was available in Half-Life 2 and a handful of other games.
Then everything disappeared and they went full 32-bit again.
The 64-bit Source engine was never much good anyway. Apparently they don't know how to optimize for 64-bit, so their 64-bit versions were generally considerably slower than the 32-bit ones.
Unlike Far Cry and Crysis for example.

leileilol wrote:

Steam's also transitioning towards 64-bit binaries right now. Lots of bugs in the beta however (steamwebhelper at fault. thanks google)

This makes perfect sense, since macOS Steam needs to be 64-bit to be working in next version of macOS. Linux is mostly 64-bit anyway for a long time (Ubuntu even drops 32-bit images altogether), and Windows is pretty much the same.

https://msfn.org/board/topic/177702-steam-for … comment-1154048

Just relaying my own experiences here; I happened to have a copy of the Steam client just before Valve introduced the overhaul w […]
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Just relaying my own experiences here; I happened to have a copy of the Steam client just before Valve introduced the overhaul which, I believe, is the reason they are putting an end to XP and Vista support. (Steam's new Discord-like messaging system and adoption of Chrome.) Even when launching this copy with -noverifyfiles, Steam still attempted to update itself.

You'll want to check your package subdirectory before launching Steam each time, because Steam will download updates to that directory and try to install them even if you try to circumvent that step.

I hope that we'll still be able to do this come 2019, but for now I'm still able to log in, download, and play games. I even get time and achievements logged. If we can continue to do this next year, I'll be happy. I can do without Steam's new messaging system: most my buddies don't even use it anymore simply because they don't know people are messaging them.

For those intending to keep using Steam on XP probably need to try restricting outbound access using the firewall and/or use a batch file to empty that folder when launching steam.

A bit off topic, but does anyone have any experience how well Origin runs on Windows XP these days? They do offer a legacy installer but can't find any confirmation it still works fine. Can't test it myself as my XP build is not finished yet.

Not that I particulary need Origin, but it would allow me to get The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection easily and very cheap, EA support apparently gives you the Ultimate Collection even if you have just the base game as retail. Without Origin I would have to settle with the main game and couple expansions that I would have to hunt from eBay.

Crank9000 wrote:

A bit off topic, but does anyone have any experience how well Origin runs on Windows XP these days? They do offer a legacy installer but can't find any confirmation it still works fine. Can't test it myself as my XP build is not finished yet.

Not that I particulary need Origin, but it would allow me to get The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection easily and very cheap, EA support apparently gives you the Ultimate Collection even if you have just the base game as retail. Without Origin I would have to settle with the main game and couple expansions that I would have to hunt from eBay.

I once tried to install Sims 4 on a WinXP SP3 machine - the base game was stated to support XP but it also requires Origin. This was at least a year ago, maybe more. I ran into problems with Origin and never got it working. I remember looking up the legacy installer but for some reason I wasn't able to get that to successfully install or operate (don't remember which). It was for a relative, and at some later date we ended up building her a PC with Win7. I never got Origin running on the WinXP machine that I had originally tried to install that game on.
Unfortunately I don't remember the details of where exactly the breakdown was with the legacy installer, and I don't have any notes about it.
I wouldn't say Origin is 100% ruled out though. Maybe there's a fix, but I didn't find one at the time.

I've noticed that retail boxed Sims 2 and it's expansions are probably the most common games to show up at the local Goodwill. If you check some thrift stores you might get lucky.

shamino wrote:

I once tried to install Sims 4 on a WinXP SP3 machine - the base game was stated to support XP but it also requires Origin. Thi […]
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Crank9000 wrote:

A bit off topic, but does anyone have any experience how well Origin runs on Windows XP these days? They do offer a legacy installer but can't find any confirmation it still works fine. Can't test it myself as my XP build is not finished yet.

Not that I particulary need Origin, but it would allow me to get The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection easily and very cheap, EA support apparently gives you the Ultimate Collection even if you have just the base game as retail. Without Origin I would have to settle with the main game and couple expansions that I would have to hunt from eBay.

I once tried to install Sims 4 on a WinXP SP3 machine - the base game was stated to support XP but it also requires Origin. This was at least a year ago, maybe more. I ran into problems with Origin and never got it working. I remember looking up the legacy installer but for some reason I wasn't able to get that to successfully install or operate (don't remember which). It was for a relative, and at some later date we ended up building her a PC with Win7. I never got Origin running on the WinXP machine that I had originally tried to install that game on.
Unfortunately I don't remember the details of where exactly the breakdown was with the legacy installer, and I don't have any notes about it.
I wouldn't say Origin is 100% ruled out though. Maybe there's a fix, but I didn't find one at the time.

I've noticed that retail boxed Sims 2 and it's expansions are probably the most common games to show up at the local Goodwill. If you check some thrift stores you might get lucky.

All right, thanks. I'm probably going to test it when I can, going to be a few months before I get the room for my XP machine. If it proves problematic that's ok, I'd rather keep XP offline as much as possible anyway. Its just the sheer number of those expansions and stuff packs, I really can't be bothered to find them all and store all those boxes 😁

I really wish Steam would offer a redistributable legacy client for older systems.. they could freeze development on it, but just offer it as a barebones client to check DRM and launch (older) games.

Srandista wrote:

This makes perfect sense, since macOS Steam needs to be 64-bit to be working in next version of macOS. Linux is mostly 64-bit anyway for a long time (Ubuntu even drops 32-bit images altogether), and Windows is pretty much the same.

Except there isn't any benefit in using 64-bit binaries on Windows, at least not for an application like Steam. I really hope they won't force us to use 64-bit Windows anytime soon..

I have to disagree. 32 bit on modern OS (past Win 7, but definitely on 10) should die already. I cannot find any reasonable reason, why MS released Win 10 in 32 bit, and I hope, it'll die sooner then later. Backward compatibility is amazing thing, but it's also slowing progress drastically, and since we have 32 bit OSes since 1995, I would say, it's time to move on...

Note though, that I'm not against using 32 bit in general, but when somebody wants to use old HW with old apps, he/she should also use old OS with it. And MS itself is definitely not doing anything against use of old OSes (minus requiring higher SSE instructions in some cases, but when someone needs that PC just for playing old games, there is no reason to connect it to the internet and therefore updating it).

32bit is needed because there's ALOT of hardware out there used by businesses without driver support. Microsoft wouldn't have released it if there wasn't a need for it.
With Server there was no need so they dropped 32bit, with workstation there was so they kept it. Simple as that.

It does make you wonder with Windows 10 supposedly being the last OS when 32bit will be dropped.

Good example: At my work we have 1000+ POS machines running XP POS currently using Intel Celeron single core processors (Don't worry they do support SSE2). Plan is to upgrade them to full blown Windows 7 end of this year.... and that's a fairly tame example.

not just old hardware, I don't know right now but 1-2 years ago all those cheap windows 10 devices (mostly with x64 capable bay trail atom based CPUs) with heavily discounted (or free) OS from MS were forced to run 32bit Windows;

more on topic, it's understandable but a shame, I also think that they could make a basic legacy version of steam and maintain some support for that... only for installing your games, there is no need to support the full version with store and all the other features....

anyway, once again this shows that you really need a backup of the files and DRM free or crack to be safe preserving old games...

Reminds me how annoyed I am at that some of the things I bought on itunes, but apparently never backed up [cos surely I didn't need to...], got removed from the apple store by the copyright holder. Luckily I don't use steam. Gog seems to wrap everything up to work [mostly] though I recall an issue with Planescape [fixed with an enhanced version]. Presumably they rework binaries where wrapping up old/original versions doesn't produce something that works on current platforms.

This is especially annoying to me because if the game itself supports XP, you should be allowed to play it on there. Stuff like this is complete bullshit and is one of the many reasons why I refuse to spend any more than a few dollars on digital games. I'm all for physical copies whenever possible. After I heard about this, I installed Steam and Skullgirls on my WinXP PC and put it in offline mode. Hopefully keeping it in offline mode and not having the PC connected to the internet is enough...

Make sure you block it in the firewall as well.

Use smartsteamemu instead (assuming it works with that game) instead of steam offline mode.

thepirategamerboy12 wrote:

This is especially annoying to me because if the game itself supports XP, you should be allowed to play it on there. Stuff like this is complete bullshit and is one of the many reasons why I refuse to spend any more than a few dollars on digital games. I'm all for physical copies whenever possible. After I heard about this, I installed Steam and Skullgirls on my WinXP PC and put it in offline mode. Hopefully keeping it in offline mode and not having the PC connected to the internet is enough...

You know what is funny, there are games out on Steam that were made for XP 32-bit that don't actually work right on 64-bit systems, but now Steam does not run on 32-bit hardware so they will be selling games that don't work on Steam anymore. 😕 😵

Don't mention that on the Steam forums. According to them all XP games work fine on Windows 10 and those that don't (which are very few according to them) can be easily made to work with "tweaks", "settings", "patches", etc..... They aren't quite right in the head over there.

I cannot find any reasonable reason, why MS released Win 10 in 32 bit

Prescott CPUs without 64-bit extensions, also some incompatible Athlon 64 models. Yes, it's an old junk, but still actively used in some companies. Heck, I've even stumbled upon some AMD K6-2 and Celeron Mendocino systems with Windows 2000, which were still used all the way up to the current decade (Windows 2000 support was dropped in 2010).

DosFreak wrote:

Don't mention that on the Steam forums. According to them all XP games work fine on Windows 10 and those that don't (which are very few according to them) can be easily made to work with "tweaks", "settings", "patches", etc..... They aren't quite right in the head over there.

Um, but they're right? I can't think of many games that can't be made to run under Windows 10 and that are available on Steam.

ZellSF wrote:

Um, but they're right? I can't think of many games that can't be made to run under Windows 10 and that are available on Steam.

Some games do not work at all.

And you have to make a distinction between "barely run" and "without issues".

I only tried a few (GTA 4, Flatout 2) and both had serious problems. They run, but not particularly good (you have to tinker to fix Flatout controls and GTA - well, it's one fugly mess). Zero issues with XP.