No

FWIW the current steam beta client (the bleeding edge) still supports Windows XP. The real requirement is a SSE-supporting processor

Also Steam games before when 98 support was dropped were still mostly the usual Valve (with Day of Defeat Source being the most recent), plus a handful of third party indie (Darwinia, Ragdoll Kung Fu etc). It likely won't be possible to dust off and use that old green thing with the more recent Steam libraries due to new steam_api.dll callbacks and etc.

This is the reasons I prefer buying from GOG these days. I have a ton of awesome Windows XP era games on Steam though, one day they will shut the door I fear.

Yeah I agree GOG is a great place to buy games. Only $10 or less for great titles. I just wish some of the old Microsoft games like The Movies Stunts and Effects or Age of Mythology would arrive on there.

Apparently you can now link your Steam and GOG accounts and any games you have on your Steam library will show up in your GOG library too.
I'm not sure entirely how this works or if there are any dangers in doing so (like you can no longer use that game on the Steam platform, or your GOG activity is now tracked by the Steam client or displayed somehow).

computergeek92 wrote:

I would want to play my Steam games for decades

Eh, who knows what the future holds? Maybe Valve won't be around for decades.

Personally I still keep playing the same PC games I played 15 years ago and I don't intend on stopping.

You must have an awful lot of free time.

snorg wrote:

Apparently you can now link your Steam and GOG accounts and any games you have on your Steam library will show up in your GOG library too.
I'm not sure entirely how this works or if there are any dangers in doing so (like you can no longer use that game on the Steam platform, or your GOG activity is now tracked by the Steam client or displayed somehow).

It is quite limited. For a brief period, GOG allowed you to link your Steam account and a number of games from a small, speciifc selection would subsequently be added to your GOG library if you had them in your Steam library. At the time, GOG suggested they might do it again in the future for a different selection.

Seriously, with Microsoft around and as quickly as computer stuff changes I really doubt Valve will be around for decades. I admit, there are times where I like to fire up and old game or two but my free time is limited these days, and as I get older I became ever more aware of the fact that I don't have that much time left.

Regarding GOG: I did not realize they were limiting it in that fashion. I don't really see a reason to do it then. Rather just wait for a sale and buy a dupe if I really want it DRM free that badly.

Maybe this will help... With wayback.archive i found the steam store site from the year 2008 and later..

http://web.archive.org/web/20080930063016/htt … eampowered.com/

Would recommend to try that.

Use Paul's advice to get an old version (non-pirated). Personally, I got the last working version off my backup drive. Then I googled for advice on blocking updates. It's actually quite easy.

Make a text file containing 1 line: BootStrapperInhibitAll=Enable

Name it Steam.cfg. Open the Steam app with right-click -> Show Package Contents. Put your Steam.cfg file inside Contents/MacOS within the app. Now it won't auto-update.

There are sites out there like FileHippo or OldVersion.com that will let you download the older versions of the Steam client. However, it's REALLY not recommended to do so.

With that being said, unless you want to block Steam from checking its servers for a new update, this will almost always involve the usage of a pirated Steam client.

Usage of a pirated Steam client is against the Steam user agreement and cause problems for you as the user, the least of which is the permanent banning of your Steam Account as well as being banned from any games which uses the Steam VAC.

If your OSX Client isn't working, before using an older version, try heading to the Steam community forum and see if there are others with the same issue. If possible, reinstall the client. (You SHOULD be able to do this without having to redownload the games already installed.)

Iam maybe going trying it out later, or steam can lick my balls, so i will use GOG.com instead.

Separate question: On the GOG site, how good are the Linux versions of the games you can download? (You can download the PC, Mac or Linux ported versions of many games) Will the Linux GOG games work on an offline Linux machine such as with my Ubuntu based Zorin?

I played the LInux version of Outlast and didn't notice any real difference. Also Amnesia: Dark Descent. Played just fine, looked good, etc.

Steam is mostly a DRM system. You're not meant to be able to use older weaker versions of their protections.

There's no clean way, if you want to play your Steam games in the future, get cracks for them now and remove the dependency on Steam.

Yea, that's one side of Steam that I don't like. I have bought Half-Life on Steam, but I can no longer play it on my PowerVR system, because I need to run it on Win9x (no drivers for other OSes), and if I install an old version of Steam/Half-Life, it will automatically update to a version that is not compatible with Win9x.

to be fair, the steam version of half-life has never ever supported any MiniGL drivers, and would probably consider it as a cheat if you tried one online. and i wouldn't bother with anything newer than 1.1.0.x retail anyway since the steam version also axes a couple renderer-related features

leileilol wrote:

to be fair, the steam version of half-life has never ever supported any MiniGL drivers, and would probably consider it as a cheat if you tried one online. and i wouldn't bother with anything newer than 1.1.0.x retail anyway since the steam version also axes a couple renderer-related features

Is that so? I never managed to try it, but I would expect that the game just looks for an opengl32.dll. So if I placed one somewhere in the search path (eg replacing the one in \windows\system32), it should work fine, I would think.

snorg wrote:

Apparently you can now link your Steam and GOG accounts and any games you have on your Steam library will show up in your GOG library too.
I'm not sure entirely how this works or if there are any dangers in doing so (like you can no longer use that game on the Steam platform, or your GOG activity is now tracked by the Steam client or displayed somehow).

I tried it, and none of my games were supported. Then again, I had a few games I already purchased separately on both platforms so ymmv.

computergeek92 wrote:

Separate question: On the GOG site, how good are the Linux versions of the games you can download? (You can download the PC, Mac or Linux ported versions of many games) Will the Linux GOG games work on an offline Linux machine such as with my Ubuntu based Zorin?

None of the GOG games have any kind of online dependency (except for multiplayer stuff). Linux GOG games will work offline, Windows GOG games will work offline, etc.

However, I'm inclined to believe Linux versions are even less "future-proof" than Windows versions. Trying to get a Linux program from today working a Linux computer even a few years from now will probably be possible, but only after hours of excruciating agony trying to track down old versions of outdated libraries and all of the outdated dependencies of those libraries.

I've ran the linux version of UT99 just fine on a modern distro. The only issue I had was having to fake a /dev/dsp device through a alsa plugin. You also have to force vsync with your graphics driver for it to be timed properly too, or somehow get UTGLR compiled for Linux ut436.

I had another friend of mine get the linux version of Descent 3 running on his fairly new ArchLinux system, most of the linux games on Steam have lib directories and LD_LIBRARY_PATH variables to compensate for dependency hell.