Im getting together some parts to make an ultimate XP box like this, and Im trying to set the rule of only use officially supported parts, but the CPU is allways a point of contention, while common consensus is that the 3rd gen intel is the last to offciially support, others say 4th gen, I have a i7 4th gen that works perfectly

RetroBus wrote on 2025-10-06, 02:36:

Im getting together some parts to make an ultimate XP box like this, and Im trying to set the rule of only use officially supported parts, but the CPU is allways a point of contention, while common consensus is that the 3rd gen intel is the last to offciially support, others say 4th gen, I have a i7 4th gen that works perfectly

I use an i7-4790k in my XP machine.

Just curious Shponglefan, but would you be able to list the games and programs you've been able to run without any issues on this system? Like, what are the oldest games, or games that tend to not work properly on Windows 10\11?

Also, if you've run into issues with certain games, can you give a quick rundown of which games and what the problems were?

No rush of course, it'd just be interesting to have some more data on this since I'm sure a lot of maxed out XP builds will share a lot of specs with yours.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-10-06, 02:48:

Just curious Shponglefan, but would you be able to list the games and programs you've been able to run without any issues on this system?

I'm using a similar system, and I have listed the games that ran well on it in this post.

Most of these I've played from start to finish on that rig.

Hans Tork wrote on 2025-10-05, 17:07:

I am using the 368 version as it is an easy download from Phil`s website and does not need any tinkering with the files. Does the 355 have any benefit over the 368 driver.

I got away with simply taking the modded file nv4_dispi.inf from the 368 version and dropping it into the 355 version.

What are some go to examples that an XP build provides access to? I have tried a few games that were designed for DirectX 8.1 and they so far have worked on a modern Window 11 machine with minor effort.

This is not meant as a negative response. I have spent time asking myself if I want to build such a thing. But I struggle to list examples that would take me back to 2003 with original hardware.

Unreal Tournament 2003 (a great game lost to time and UT 2004 stomping over it), seems to run fine in Windows 11 and a Geforce 4070TI Super. And that's with no patches. Surely there are other XP era experiences that are not as smooth to get working. What are they?

When I build custom, my motivation is asking myself "What experience does this get me access to?" I'm really not sure what an XP build can grant me. Win98 and DOS era gear is that wild time of varying proprietary API's and hardware. XP seems to be in an era of standards. A virtual machine probably could run stubborn software as well. If Winamp doesn't work in Windows 11, I would imagine it would run well in a VM.

Sound hardware is sometimes interesting. I have an nforce2 board with the soundstorm. But that was just a solution to get everything encoded into DD 5.1 for output. That's not really out of reach with other technology and not something proprietary to emulate.

3D acceleration by this time is in the same general standards as we have today. DirectX stuff. OpenGL stuff.

If it's purely Operating System nostalgia and seeing old hardware only, that is perfectly understandable.

bytesaber wrote on 2026-02-23, 09:26:

What are some go to examples that an XP build provides access to? I have tried a few games that were designed for DirectX 8.1 and they so far have worked on a modern Window 11 machine with minor effort.

You can get the vast majority of WinXP era games running on modern systems by either using wrappers like dgVoodoo2 or fan-made patches. Some of those old titles use outdated DRM implementations (e.g. StarForce) which might need to be dealt with as well. But as you say, it's a minor inconvenience. What I appreciate about WinXP is that everything works right out of the box. This is nice if you have a collection of physical games, and just want to insert the disc, install the game and play.

bytesaber wrote on 2026-02-23, 09:26:

Sound hardware is sometimes interesting. I have an nforce2 board with the soundstorm. But that was just a solution to get everything encoded into DD 5.1 for output.

Positional audio is just one part of the equation. Creative's EAX is a bit more complicated, and it doesn't help that they made the later versions proprietary. You can read more about EAX and its various features on the Vogons wiki page.

Then there's the fact that Microsoft completely removed the DirectSound Hardware Abstraction Layer from Vista onward. This means that most games which use DirectSound and/or EAX will need some kind of workaround to restore that functionality. Again, this too can be circumvented on modern Windows via wrappers and such. But on WinXP, with an Audigy or X-Fi card, hardware accelerated audio works right out of the box.

bytesaber wrote on 2026-02-23, 09:26:

What are some go to examples that an XP build provides access to? I have tried a few games that were designed for DirectX 8.1 and they so far have worked on a modern Window 11 machine with minor effort.

This is not meant as a negative response. I have spent time asking myself if I want to build such a thing. But I struggle to list examples that would take me back to 2003 with original hardware.

Unreal Tournament 2003 (a great game lost to time and UT 2004 stomping over it), seems to run fine in Windows 11 and a Geforce 4070TI Super. And that's with no patches. Surely there are other XP era experiences that are not as smooth to get working. What are they?

It's not Windows XP era, but 32-bit Windows XP still supports native 16-bit Windows games. 16-bit support was removed from later 64-bit versions of Windows.

My first dip into retro hardware started because I wanted to play Civilization II which is a 16-bit game. Civ II also supports widescreen aspect ratios, so running on my XP machine, I can run a native CD-based install in 16:10 aspect ratio.

IIRC a patch exists to run Civ II on modern 64-bit versions of Windows. But if one is simply downloading, patching, or emulating games to run on modern systems, there's little reason to run anything on legacy hardware.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2026-02-23, 10:09:

What I appreciate about WinXP is that everything works right out of the box. This is nice if you have a collection of physical games, and just want to insert the disc, install the game and play.

This is another big reason I built this machine. I still have all my old XP era games.

While some games are available through modern digital game stores (Steam, GoG), there are others that are not.

For example, Battlefield 2 was another game I wanted to play. I still have my original copy which installs and plays just fine on my XP system. Since it's not legally available to buy/download, getting it working on a modern PC involves jumping through a lot more hoops.