Windows XP Activation: Game Over
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Free Idea for Microsoft: Windows XP PCs but like those mini consoles[0] that have been released recently. Could be preloaded with games from the era and intended to be used offline so patches don't matter.
I bought quite a few of them when they were slashed back in 2019. $15, free shipping, quite a value. The scene is largely ran by 2 redditors now.
So, only Microsoft published ones then. You realise that right?
You can buy and play Windows XP era games on Steam and run them just great on Windows 10/11.
FEAR is a great one, released in 2005, still looks and plays amazing. https://store.steampowered.com/app/21090/FEAR/
So I have no idea what you mean :)
Or older (pre-Steam) games in a virtual machine.
Hyper-V comes with Pro versions of Windows. VMWare has a Player that is also free (plus there's full Workstation). There's also VirtualBox, which sometimes is the packaged solution for very old titles sold on platforms like GOG. Never mind the solutions for Mac OS, Linux and BSD.
Recently my jam is going back to 1994 and playing a game from the Windows 3.1/Windows 95 transition era, rife with 16-bit libraries -- Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol. A game in which it was likely a lot of older folks here played the crap out of the demo, but never bought the game because it involved sending a check in the mail -- and because even the demo could provide hundreds of hours of enjoyment. Though you can legitimately buy it online from its current IP owner for about $10 (more if you want a boxed copy!), and it's just as fun as I remember it 30 years ago.
And setting it up in a virtual machine? Very straightforward, save for digging up some third-party audio library the game wanted. I actually just have a 40GB Windows XP VM I just maintain with all my old games from DOS and Windows 3.1 through 2002 or so. I can move it between hypervisors, between host OSes, etc. Just works. All my old games always ready to go.
gog in perticular got a custom licensed version of dosbox in exchange for funding.
[1] https://jasomill.at/Fallout2.mp4
N.B.: AFAIK, running 16-/32-bit Windows software under open-source Wine on Mac OS, as seen here, is no longer possible on 10.15+ due to Apple dropping support for 32-bit software; commercial CrossOver[2] supports 32-bit software on newer Mac OS versions (and I assume 16-bit, though I haven't tested it).
Game wasn’t a real commercial success because its demo was too good, and it wasn’t on store shelves. IP rights were sold to Decklin’s Domain, who at least seems to be a great steward, even if the website looks straight out of the mid-90s.
Original author is still around doing some startup consulting in the Denver area. Think he made the game damn near straight out of college.
Again, still loads of fun. Completely worth the $10. I’ve been having a blast with it lately, and the help file is exhaustive like an early 90s computer game manual.
I take no responsibility for the ensuing impact to your productivity.
Whereas Wine could be made to have tailored instances per game (which I think PlayOnLinux, Crossover, Proton... are doing), giving the best experience for each game.
IIRC there are even some games that can now only be run on Windows by running them via Wine on Windows.
If only I could get these to work on my M1 MacBook Pro. Now that would be something.
There is hardly anything backwards compatible during the multiple WinRT reboots that have happened since then.
Note: I am a linux user, I am just surprised that those games would work on linux but not on windows.
I remember back in the days refusing to buy games because it was reported they were installing silently some weird software drivers that looked more like malware than real software.
I did see THIS the other day: https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/1657921973786144770
EDIT: Mere MINUTES after I posted this, I came across an HN thread devoted to one of those!
MAS is awesome. Anyways MS doesn't care about private piracy. They rather have you pirate Windows than leave the platform and use another OS. This is my conspiracy theory about WSL too (which is an actual nice software but still).
I had to whitelist the directory in Windows Security because it makes MSAV grumpy and then uploads it's grumpiness home.
In the past 6-7 years most of the applications I've worked on, even those using Visual Studio, C#, etc. Have been tested/deployed on Linux more than Windows.
I don't see how WSL is embrace-extend-extinguish. Embrace, yes. Extend? No. There's basically nothing that only runs on WSL and not real Linux. Only QoL integrations with the Windows shell like X11/Wayland and Explorer integration. The point of WSL is backend dev. If WSL were on an EEE path, you'd expect to see MS adding Windows-only integrations, and encouraging people to run WSL server instances. Instead, MS has never positioned WSL for prod use, and instead cautions against using it for non-dev activities. Even internally, we don't use WSL to host Linux stuff. We use CBL-Mariner instead [1], which is completely FOSS.
The whole point of WSL was that Windows lost to Linux for backend. Unlike Ballmer, Satya didn't want to waste resources fighting a losing battle, so he pivoted the company towards Azure and dev tooling and away from Windows Server. And that succeeded, and it's why we're not irrelevant like IBM - we ditched our mainframes, as it were.
Not going to weigh in on the other aspects of this but I think this is untrue nowadays. Direct3D off-screen rendering and DirectML are supported in WSL2 and while there are several Direct3D implementations that run on Linux, I don't think there has been an attempt at DirectML yet, and neither are ever going to be possible using official drivers and official DirectX like you can on Windows with WSL2.
microsoft is the same old microsoft, and people would do well to remember it
so summary: microsoft being microsoft
> MS has never positioned WSL for prod use, and instead cautions against using it for non-dev activities.
Exactly, WSL is deliberately kept an inferior product so that people are discouraged from developing for Linux.
The only reason I even consider Windows as my OS these days is because of WSL, but even then I realize I still run into a lot of nonsense that is absent on Linux. One that comes to mind is how PyCharm has to whitelist project files so that Microsoft Defender doesn't scan them, and that requires a UAC prompt for every project I create. Give me a break.
Making your product better ain't anti-competitive.
Home users are whatever.
In Windows 10, if you don't activate, all that happens is that it displays "Unregistered" in the corner and refuses to let you change the desktop wallpaper (and you can even get around that by rearming the "trial").
I also see lots of reports that updates other than critical/security ones may not be downloaded and applied for unregistered installs, but I'm not sure how true that is (or if it's mostly moot because I know you still get the big spring/fall patches, or at least have historically).
One of them is the "transparency effects" toggle, which needs to be off in VMs with VirtualBox Guest Additions installed for things to work right, and is on by default.
> Kinguin's merchants acquire the codes from wholesalers who have surplus copies of Windows they don't need. "It's not a gray market. It would be like buying Adidas or Puma or Nike from a discounter, from TJ Maxx," Jordan said. "There are no legal issues with buying it from us. It's just another marketplace."
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/get-windows-10-free-or-...
These keys may activate just fine, but they are not "legit" in any case. Most turn out to be acquired in illicit ways (MSDN licenses, ...), and a couple years ago here in Germany this led to massive amounts of criminal cases [1].
[1] https://www.borncity.com/blog/2021/03/05/betrug-mit-office-w...
I don't know why a site that is usually reputable (tomsHardware) has gotten the facts wrong on this.
Legal discussion:
> In the EU, software license resale is legal, even if explicitly forbidden by terms of any EULA or other contract imposed upon the parties.
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/50462/is-resale-of-w...
I develop industrial IoT gateways that are deployed to client sites, often in places which aren’t massively well secured from a physical perspective. Often an attacker could get in with a hi-vis vest and a clipboard.
Hardware attestation allows us to store encryption keys for the internal storage in a way that makes that storage useless if you remove it from the device. Signature enforcement prevents an attacker from booting their own OS on the devices and extracting keys that way (this also works alongside hardware attestation, as the TPM isn’t going to return a valid decryption key unless the expected kernel has booted). Remote key revocation allows us to terminate the device’s connection to our backend if it’s stolen.
If general purpose computers were routinely shipping with all those features turned on to ensure you could only boot a properly licensed version of Windows, and you had no access to enrol new keys, then I’d be with you, but that’s not the reality of things. If I buy a computer, either an Intel PC or an Apple desktop/laptop, I can install an OS of my choosing on it. We haven’t really lost anything here beyond the ability for people to trivially compromise computers without being detected.
What they really want to stop is businesses selling PCs with pirated copies of windows. And that was quite common back in the Windows 95 days and is still common in some countries.
You can run newer computers but they only just work and cost way more than they're worth.
It's a real shame you end up in a situation where it's cheaper to replace a machine than keep it going just because the software is so hard to get working on a new PC and PC hardware has a limited life. It's effectively bricking a 6 meter CNC machine. That is a lot of machine.
Few years ago PC was destroyed. Don't ask - long story because fan stop working due dust. So company purchased 2 PCs with similar configuration just to be sure that they have backup plans. New CNC machine costs over $250k.
In principle your VM/emulator could intercept guest reads/writes to those selected addresses and pass them (using host-side kernel driver) directly to the card. If the card uses no IRQ nor DMA, that could work. Routing IRQs would be tricky (again: determining which card raises which interrupt without global configuration registers requires a lot of manual work and/or guessing), but I guess it's doable.
DMA won't work. As far as I can tell, you can't use IOMMU to isolate ISA bus memory requests, let alone isolate a single device from the bus. Without knowing how card receives DMA parameters from the driver and no hardware support to translate device-generated addresses, your card would corrupt host memory on first DMA request.
They wanted it on corp wifi however... that was a no-go
However, IE mode in Edge comes with 1) an unremovable banner warning you to stop using IE mode and 2) an automatic 6 month expiration of sites you put in the IE Mode whitelist (supposedly overrulable by a GPO - but it's commonly broken).
It turned out to be less trouble to spin up an XP VM and make IE available to network users as a Remote App.
Easily embeddable in a .NET app: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/co...
I’d be cautious about using a DVR for any sensitive situation if it’s unmaintained if the Dvr is used in sensitive scenarios. There would be a significant amount of reputational damage if it’s ever hacked, particularly if ugly workarounds are used to bypass software being totally EOL’d.
The user agent thing makes me think you're trying to fool the DVR. The DVR requires a browser that is running it's ActiveX plugin. IE is the only browser that runs them.
> I’d be cautious about using a DVR for any sensitive situation if it’s unmaintained if the Dvr is used in sensitive scenarios.
External access to the DVR is limited (by the firewall) to 1 external IP address. If it were hacked, someone would have breached the firewall and the DVR would be the least of our issues.
PS: VLK XP doesn't suffer this problem.
Edit: Nice utility to extract product keys from a live system. https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html
If you go into properties, does it show XP isn't activated? IIRC, early XP releases didn't nag from the tray. I've also seen some Dell installs that auto activated after pulling the key from BIOS.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_licensing#Leaked_keys
If Microsoft had panache they'd release a final Windows XP ISO that would only take that key.
Most Linux 'reviews' back then were basically a review on how easy (or more likely, hard) it is to install. Most distros installers faired pretty poorly back then. I succeeded in getting RedHat 7 installed, but could never get Slackware or SUSE to successfully install.
They all had GUI interactive installers, and had floppy boot disks to boot (too!)
Mandrake (9.2 is the version I used the most) was very nice, the GUI installer looked very polished, had nice explanations and package selection was done by answering “what are you going to use this computer for?”. A TUI installer was available as a safe option too.
[1] At that time you are in SCO OpenServer territory, SCO UNIX is OLD, but the same applies to OpenServer 5 and 6. It might have been UnixWare (which I only installed once, no memories of it) or maybe SCO Linux (oh, the irony!)
So if you're going to start with something like Windows XP service pack 3, meaning that you were someone who didn't jump straight to Vista (I'll be a Vista apologist, but people were being reasonable when they didn't jump from XP), at that point, you're comparing it to Linux distros of 2008. That would be something like Fedora 8, Ubuntu 8, or Debian 4. This was the GNOME 2 era and it was a pretty damn smooth experience.
If you're thinking a bit deeper in terms of user experience for the early, early 2000s, then you would probably put FreeBSD high up on your list rather than treating Linux as an assumption.
people want to use windows XP in order to run old software that doesn't run on newer systems. (or because they are nostalgic, but those are not helped with linux, so we can ignore them)
a modern linux distribution is way more likely to run old linux and windows software than a modern windows version.
hence that's why the world needs linux, because it doesn't have the problems that windows upgrades have.
you may argue that new linux distributions don't have old libraries either, which is true, but getting older libraries to install and run is way easier than on windows. and it's possible to put an old linux binary (even one for which there is no source) into an environment and make it workable on a modern linux distribution, and with things like flatpak it is also possible to make such an environment easily installable for a non-technical end user. getting old windows binaries to run is even easier because that's exactly how wine works.
Specifically said prior machines are:
* A Windows 7 Sandy Bridge desktop.
* A Windows XP Pentium 4 Northwood desktop.
* A Windows 98SE Pentium 2 laptop, with a Yamaha XG MIDI sound card.
Microsoft and Windows are downright legendary with their commitment to backwards compatibility, but that becomes even better with access to many versions of Windows and the hardware of their times.
Linux would not satisfy my needs and desires in any of my machines, let alone my daily driver. I don't have the time nor desire to faff around with dependency hell and terminal voodoo and maybe get something that half-works (which will immediately bork to a stiff breeze) when Windows instead will Just Always Work(tm) and get me going.
linux may not satisfy your needs, but not everyone can afford to keep old machines around like you do. and those stories of dependency hell and terminal voodoo are corner cases on linux just as much as they are on windows. especially if someone is going to set up a linux machine specifically to run old windows programs in wine then they most certainly will not run into any such issues.
most cases of dependency hell on linux are likely caused by inexperienced users who follow bad advice to install software from the wrong version or a different distribution. don't do that if you don't know how to do it without causing problems.
I prefer linux in theory for my personal machines but I can hardly get a week without some issue (on ostensibly stable Ubuntu) either causing it to randomly fail when waking from sleep, gnome-desktop having catastrophic bugs like leaking memory to the point where none is left, or pegging the CPU, or stuttering, or....
and even without extensive packages installed I have things breaking there constantly, where I have to fight with apt and etc.
MS backwards compatibility too is really an incredible feat.
It was dual booting that would get you every time.
By 2002 I managed to get some district installed, but all I accomplished was having my distro eat my lab report (umount? Wtf?).
I didn't really get into Linux until grad school, and then only because i had to use an SGI daily
I remember circa 2004 I set up my non technical brother with one of the earliest versions of Ubuntu, after he kept getting malware on XP, and he didn't have difficulty with it. I was kind of surprised how easy it was. I was a debian and OpenBSD user at the time.
I stopped trying to use Linux as a desktop OS since then. But recently I tried for fun installing Ubuntu and everything just worked out of the box.
I still feel Linux is too fragmented, too many package managers, too many UI managers etc...but that's part of the beauty of it I guess.
It even had a tetris game you could play while waiting for the packages to be copied in the background.
As a kid at the time i installed it on pretty much any PC i could get my hands on - my own, relatives, friends, etc, nobody was safe :-P though they found it interesting anyway since it was chock full of applications and games to play around - and i don't remember ever having issues. I tried it recently in 86box (which emulates old PCs) and it worked as good as i remember.
Though in a way it was probably an exceptional case, IMO that CD was basically the best well-put together distro (especially when you consider that KDE was basically beta software at the time).
Microsoft wants your money and your loyalty.
I have yet to discover what Linux geeks want except for you to join them in some weird reality distortion field.
Two iMacs. One with Mint and one with Ubuntoo. Both just literally crawl. Alpine is so much faster, and we are gaining speed by hook and crook.
Did they steal the key from Microsoft, or perform some cryptanalysis to crack it, or something else?