I've ruined XP builds for myself \ VOGONS

I've ruined XP builds for myself

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First post, by Almoststew1990

Posted on 2021-09-24, 08:43

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Sometimes I'm watching videos online or reading reviews and her the urge to play some 2000 to 2006 games and build an XP PC. But I can never seem to get it to work.

I used to have a few (10) disk games before I sold them all and an ever growing GOG library, currently 120 games. I also have a fair few games on Steam from this era like Condemned Criminal Origins and half lives.

The problem I have is I can't get XP to be workable online anymore to access my GOG games. Even with a 3GHz C2Q on the final XP Opera browser it refuses to load my GOG library. And of course Steam doesn't work without some trickery.

So that kind of leaves me with my post Windows 98 gaming being done on Windows 7 where the latest browsers work and Steam works. But this leaves me with quite a large "hardware hole" in that my Windows 98 builds tend to be up to 800MHz and an MX card and then the next usable system is a 3GHz C2Q. This is because the idea of running W7 on slower hardware is not very appealing!

So yeah I've ruined XP builds for myself because I demand convenience and "independence" from my retro builds. I've tried loading up a 64GB USB stick but that is a massive pain and just frustrates me. And Windows 7 has the tempting benefits of origin (I have the C&C 10 year pack thing on there that I use a lot) and SSDs and some GOG games not actually working on XP (Arx Fatalis for instance).

I could just buy disk games again but it's nice having all the space back on my shelves.

Reply 1 of 11, by gerry

Posted on 2021-09-24, 08:49

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can't you copy the gog games to the XP machine?

Xp is a favoured era for me, but its true that with W7 being pretty good at backwards compatibility and GOG being pretty good at everything there is less reason to use it than there is to use a DOS compatible win9x era machine

Reply 2 of 11, by Joseph_Joestar

Posted on 2021-09-24, 08:56

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Almoststew1990 wrote on 2021-09-24, 08:43:

The problem I have is I can't get XP to be workable online anymore to access my GOG games.

There's no need for that.

Download the offline game installers on your modern PC and copy them over to your WinXP machine. They will run fine.

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Reply 3 of 11, by vetz

Posted on 2021-09-24, 08:57

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Offline installers is the reason why I always buy my games on GOG instead of other platforms. I got burned when Steam cut official Windows XP & Vista support.

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Reply 4 of 11, by Almoststew1990

Posted on 2021-09-24, 09:28

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Yeah I probably should just stick them all on a 64gb SD card or something. It just takes so long 🙁

Edit- or set up some kind of home network, which would also be useful for storage of larger games between reinstalls...

Reply 5 of 11, by Pierre32

Posted on 2021-09-24, 10:05

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Yep, home network for sure 😀 Maybe a Pi based NAS with a nice fat SSD hanging off it. Or if you want to take it up a level, a commercial NAS with dual network interfaces, so you can run two networks, keeping the retro stuff off the internet but still share files between machines. eg: https://youtu.be/o1-wMRDHhmg

Reply 6 of 11, by Fujoshi-hime

Posted on 2021-09-24, 15:22

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Pierre32 wrote on 2021-09-24, 10:05:

Yep, home network for sure 😀 Maybe a Pi based NAS with a nice fat SSD hanging off it. Or if you want to take it up a level, a commercial NAS with dual network interfaces, so you can run two networks, keeping the retro stuff off the internet but still share files between machines. eg: https://youtu.be/o1-wMRDHhmg

I love that even my Windows ME machine can see all the SMB shares on my UnRAID servers. I just set up a folder to copy things to the retro PCs . Copy to that share from modern PC, copy from that share to retro PC.

Reply 7 of 11, by cyclone3d

Posted on 2021-09-24, 16:30

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Almoststew1990 wrote on 2021-09-24, 09:28:

Yeah I probably should just stick them all on a 64gb SD card or something. It just takes so long 🙁

Edit- or set up some kind of home network, which would also be useful for storage of larger games between reinstalls...

If you want a faster solution, put a SATA swappable drive bay in both computers and use a nice and fast SSD. Then when you want to add more games to the XP machine, you just move it over to the newer machine and copy them onto the SSD and then move the drive back.

That's going to be that absolute fastest way unless you have a 10Gb connection between the XP and newer machines.

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Reply 8 of 11, by mihai

Posted on 2021-09-24, 18:21

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windows xp works online quite ok even now. You need to update the certificates and use a modern retro browser, such as roytam1's compiles.

Choose an appropriate browser from http://rtfreesoft.blogspot.com/ and go online. I like basilisk a lot, with legacy ublock extension.

Needless to say, going online with an XP system is not recommended, unless you know exactly what you are doing - proper firewall, all relevant patches installed etc.

Reply 9 of 11, by Sombrero

Posted on 2021-09-25, 10:44

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Almoststew1990 wrote on 2021-09-24, 08:43:

and some GOG games not actually working on XP (Arx Fatalis for instance).

If this isn't a case of GOG making the current offline game/installer somehow incompatible with XP, I remember having to use Win98 compatibility mode with XP with retail copy of Arx or the game would constantly CTD.

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2021-09-24, 08:43:

I could just buy disk games again but it's nice having all the space back on my shelves.

Sure, but those shelves sure would also look awfully nice with retail copies of your personal favorites! (I need to get more cabinet space soon, and by soon I mean NOW)

Reply 10 of 11, by Almoststew1990

Posted on 2021-09-25, 10:55

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I'm not sure how I feel about buying a bunch of games for a third time though!

My interim solution this morning is to set my PC copying a whole bunch of offline installers to the 64GB uSD card. Now I think about it I don't really have any hardware left in between my 450 Slot 1 and some Pentium D chips, other than a Sempron 2800, so it's not exactly a pressing need. But It just feels wrong to play a bunch of EAX games with an Audigy 2 ZS and without EAX (on W7).

mihai wrote on 2021-09-24, 18:21:
Choose an appropriate browser from http://rtfreesoft.blogspot.com/ and go online. I like basilisk a lot, with legacy ublock extension.

I will try Basilisk out!