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FYI: Steam drops XP/Vista in 2019

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Reply 140 of 236, by infiniteclouds

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DosFreak wrote:

Think Steam command line switches, config changes and blocking outbound communication in the firewall supposedly works. I use smartsteamemu and cracks instead. I can post a list of games these work for if anyone is interested.

What about simply disconnecting the machine from the internet permanently after downloading all the XP games from your library?

Reply 141 of 236, by kode54

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At this point, I’d wholeheartedly recommend disconnecting any XP machine from the Internet anyway, since you’re never getting any further security patches or other support for the operating system. You couldn’t pay me enough to run it myself, or support anyone else doing so.

I only just barely support it with foobar2000 components, and that’s only because the player itself still supports XP. When that support ceases, I’ll probably make 1.4 my new minimum and stop linking to the static C runtime, since the player started bundling it with 1.4. Although that doesn’t exclude XP anyway, as we’re at 1.4 and still supporting XP.

I can support XP as long as Visual Studio feasibly does so, but I’m not actually testing if any of my software runs properly on anything less than 10. I already have to run my dev tools in a VM, I don’t want to have to maintain an array of VMs just to verify compatibility with old operating systems. And my desktop is a good 3 years older than Windows 10, but you won’t see me installing 7 on it now.

Reply 142 of 236, by DosFreak

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infiniteclouds wrote:
DosFreak wrote:

Think Steam command line switches, config changes and blocking outbound communication in the firewall supposedly works. I use smartsteamemu and cracks instead. I can post a list of games these work for if anyone is interested.

What about simply disconnecting the machine from the internet permanently after downloading all the XP games from your library?

Sure or you could try blocking it via the ACL on your router. The issue I have with still relying on the Steam client is when you forget and connect your machine back to the network and didn't take measures to prevent Steam from communicating or those measures stop working for whatever reason.

Also there have been issues in the past with people running Steam for a long time in Offline mode and games not working (Supposedly fixed) and also games that are using 3rd party DRM.

I don't believe the XP POS updates have discontinued yet but yeah definetly don't browse the Internet with it.

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Make your games work offline

Reply 143 of 236, by oeuvre

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They're still coming in. Also if you really want to browse, check out MyPal here https://github.com/Feodor2/Mypal

HP Z420 Workstation Intel Xeon E5-1620, 32GB, RADEON HD7850 2GB, SSD + HD, XP/7
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Reply 144 of 236, by infiniteclouds

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Do I need an older installer to get Steam up and running on Windows XP before the shutdown? I don't imagine the newest installer from their official site still works. Can anyone point me to one that does or?

I realize that it will automatically update to the latest version upon launching, but I'm just wondering about the installer, itself.

Reply 145 of 236, by BeginnerGuy

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DosFreak wrote:

Also there have been issues in the past with people running Steam for a long time in Offline mode and games not working (Supposedly fixed) and also games that are using 3rd party DRM.

I don't believe the XP POS updates have discontinued yet but yeah definetly don't browse the Internet with it.

I've been noticing lately that steam will refuse to start without authenticating after X amount of system crashes for me. I've noticed a few times that when I'm working on something that's causing the pc to crash a few times, it will no longer just auto start steam but instead ask for my login information.

On my windows 10 machine I had intentionally set my steam to offline mode before the hurricane hit us in september, but when we got the generators up a few days later, it refused to start in offline mode again.

I'm not sure about the XP build but they have clearly integrated some forced checking mechanism into the client, that or I'm nuts. Once your internet is actually out (or likely, steam is blocked), offline mode becomes difficult.

I'm really annoyed about this still. There are so many games that I sold off my hard copies that I only have via steam e.g. almost all of the id games including rtcw. Unreal gold, system shock series, and on and on. I don't have the space to start another collection of boxes, so I'm going to start ebaying the games in jewel cases I guess, cheaper that way anyway.

Sup. I like computers. Are you a computer?

Reply 147 of 236, by DosFreak

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I don't see why it wouldn't, the installer is pretty simple but I haven't tested it on XP in quite a long time since I just copy my games over and use a crack or steam emulator. On various forums I've seen complaints about Steam on Windows 2000 but not on XP so should be good.

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Reply 149 of 236, by infiniteclouds

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kode54 wrote:

“Copy my games” is amusing in my case, since I literally don’t own enough storage to install my entire library.

I just bought a 500GB SSD for my Windows XP machine -- should be plenty considering how much smaller those games were compared to nowadays.

Reply 150 of 236, by kode54

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That’s what I mean. I have a 512GB SSD, and 3 TB free on my network storage, and I doubt it would be enough for all 563 games that I’ve ever owned on Steam. Then there’s that guy in my friends list that I used to hang out with on IRC who owns over 11,000 games...

Reply 151 of 236, by infiniteclouds

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kode54 wrote:

That’s what I mean. I have a 512GB SSD, and 3 TB free on my network storage, and I doubt it would be enough for all 563 games that I’ve ever owned on Steam. Then there’s that guy in my friends list that I used to hang out with on IRC who owns over 11,000 games...

Looking over your games list... you can install every game on there that was released between XP release (end of 2001) and Windows 7 (end of 2009) with a few exceptions and have plenty of room still. There's no reason to install all of those games on an XP machine... not sure they'd all even work.

Reply 153 of 236, by infiniteclouds

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DosFreak wrote:

I don't see why it wouldn't, the installer is pretty simple but I haven't tested it on XP in quite a long time since I just copy my games over and use a crack or steam emulator. On various forums I've seen complaints about Steam on Windows 2000 but not on XP so should be good.

Doesn't work =/ There's no error or anything, just clicking the .exe for the installer does nothing in XP. When you say you copy your games over you mean you can download/install them in Windows 7 through Steam and just copy the folders? I always thought that program installations did voodoo to your registration to where you need to install the game, not just copy the files over?

Reply 154 of 236, by DosFreak

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I'll give it a try this week but really not much point since it'll stop working in Jan anyway. If the installer isn't working try copying over the steam folder and executing it.

Yeah just install on a newer OS and copy over. Most Windows games do not modify the registry on install but when you execute the game. For those that don't you can just export the .reg and import. Check my post on page 7 for running them offline without Steam.

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Reply 155 of 236, by DosFreak

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Okay I've gone through all of my Steam games and posted what's needed to make them offline: Re: FYI: Steam drops XP/Vista in 2019

39 games are being a pain. Either can't get the latest version to work or can't get to work at all so need to look into those.

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Reply 156 of 236, by bestemor

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DosFreak wrote:

39 games are being a pain. Either can't get the latest version to work or can't get to work at all so need to look into those.

Thank you for the list !
As for those painful ones, if you have the time, could you also list just the names of those as well ? 😀
Me curious...

Reply 158 of 236, by leileilol

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Here's an alternative - what Steam-supporting linux distros work on these old XP machines with full driver support and etc? 😉

Because honestly, I have no idea. There's a lot of inconsistencies and hypocrisy in the old "linux works on everything" adage often used in Linux internet evangelism, right up there with "Just get X it's easy" from those unfamiliar with the concerned hardware, along with gratuitous support regressions because upstream wants to.

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Reply 159 of 236, by xjas

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^^ depends what kind of old XP machine we're talking about. The Steam client needs SSE2 AFAIK, so assuming a P4 or Athlon 64, probably 99% of mainstream distros (Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora - 32-bit needed for the P4 obviously) will run without trouble & support virtually all the hardware out of the box. You might not be able to use the old closed-source proprietary video drivers for a 2006 ATI or Nvidia card on the latest kernel, but you can either regress a few versions or just use the built-in open source drivers which are generally "good enough", especially for Radeon cards.

I've run the very recent Mint 18.3 on my Via KT266/Athlon XP-based Shuttle XPC, which is already a couple generations older than what we're talking about. Some distros get picky about PAE, but that shouldn't be a problem for any hardware you'd want Steam on.

THAT SAID... if you're trying to play your XP-era games on XP because they run better or support more features on that OS, using Linux won't help you out, unless there's a feature-equal native version available (which is a lot more common now than it was in the XP era.) The new Proton compatibility layer is good, but it mainly targets modern stuff.

EAX should work on Linux & the built-in drivers for Audigy / EMU10k cards are actually pretty good, but I don't know how many ported games bothered to implement it. The audio subsystem on most Linux distros was a mess until quite recently. (Actually it's still the same mess, they just managed to make it work better.) I don't know about A3D but the Aureal cards are decently supported.

Edit: just checked the system requirements, the Steam client requires Ubuntu 12.04 at a minimum. This was an extremely popular and long-lived version that a lot of other distros were based on (e.g. Mint 13, which I used on one machine until last year or so.) Actual game backwards compatibility on Linux is gonna be a mixed bag regardless of whether the Steam client itself runs.

You could also just install and run SteamOS. That still exists. 😜

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