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Comment by slowhadoken | Hacker News Reader

Valve has the perfect setup right now. Your desktop, laptop, or Deck can connect to Steam.

Steam will drop Windows7/8 support January 1, 2024[1], Vista and XP support got dropped a long time ago. Meanwhile they still sell Win95/98 games on the Steam store, which won't run well or at all on a Windows10/11.

So not exactly perfect either as far as backward compatibility is concerned.

[1] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4784-4F2B-1321-80...

It depends on what you think of as perfect. Microsoft stopped supporting XP in like 2009 and Windows 8 in 2016. I run all my windows games on my Deck using proton. Games that ran on Windows 95 usually aren’t supported by the companies that made them decades ago but fans patch them. I got Vampire the Masquerade running on my Deck with little effort. So “perfect”? No. But functional? Absolutely.

Yeah, I played Descent (1995) yesterday on my deck without needing to do anything but invert the y-axis on the keypad (which is non-standard). Aside from that the game ran flawlessly. I’ve played a number of my childhood games on the deck and been incredibly impressed.

Wow I haven’t thought about Descent in a long time. I’m getting flashbacks. But yeah, I’m very impressed. I’m actually kind of proud they’re an American company too.

> Steam will drop Windows7/8 support January 1, 2024[1], Vista and XP support got dropped a long time ago. Meanwhile they still sell Win95/98 games on the Steam store, which won't run well or at all on a Windows10/11.

Why wouldn't they work well? Every time backward compatibility is mentionned, Microsoft Windows is praised as the best example of it and people brag they can still run everything they used to run in 1995.

This isn't really true beyond basic Windows GUI only programs. For example, most 2D Windows games made before the mid-2000s used a rendering API called DirectDraw. On Windows 8 and newer, DirectDraw goes through some sort of fallback rendering path and these games won't run at more than around 30 FPS with bad frame timing. The same thing happened with games that used 8-bit color with hardware palettes. Windows 8 and newer will only run at 32-bit color (the "run with 256 colors" compatibility setting was changed to just put a low color filter over the system graphics), so they are broken as well.

DirectDraw is an incredibly simple API (it doesn't even have 2D primitives - just blitting rectangles of pixels from one surface to another). AFAIK the fallback is basically doing that in software - since this is plenty fast these days - and letting the compositor handle the actual screen update. There's no reason why this would result in 30 FPS even on 20-year-old hardware, and indeed I regularly play a DirectDraw game from 1999 on Win11 without such issues.

They stopped that approach after the XP release as there was increased focus on security (more compatibility hacks = more surface area), users were able to update software online, and the sheer amount of software users could run. The old hacks for classic games are still in there though.

Well, there is overhead in testing additional windows versions, the libraries you use may use only deprecated SSL versions, and one needs to be careful not to connect them to the public internet because of unpatched security issues. And it does not allow the use of new platform features… iOS is worse: you can’t roll back iOS updates, so you need to keep one piece of hardware around for each version you test.

Microsoft has great backwards compatibility, but it isn't perfect. Those games might be coded to 1990s standards, e.g. using old graphics APIs that don't support modern GPUs.

Which ones? Apart from DOS games and windows 3.x which I would treat separatly the only graphics api I could think of was Glide for which there are modern wrappers like nglide.

Parts of DX5 and previous, such as the "retained mode", are missing from current versions of Windows entirely. Much of the remaining implementation is buggy and introduces render artifacts.

Open source projects such as dgVoodoo offer a solution to run old games, by re-implementing old DirectX and Glide on top of current DirectX [1], similar to how Wine runs DX games on Linux on top of OpenGL or Vulkan.

[1]: https://github.com/dege-diosg/dgVoodoo2

dgVoodoo2 unfortunately is not open source, and its author has stopped regular development (keeping it at small maintenance fixes) some time ago. I can only hope that projects like WineD3D for windows[1] can make up for it in the long term, but we're one breaking Directx update away from going back to the start.

[1]https://fdossena.com/?p=wined3d/index.frag

Retained mode was deeply unpopular even back when it was supposed to be the flagship API, for good reasons (it was slow as hell), so the games that relied on it for support can literally be counted on both hands.

That aside, the only other old game API that I can think of that's gone for good is DirectPlay, which generally means no multiplayer for games that depend on it as the only option, but otherwise doesn't affect them.

People brag about a lot of things and windows compat is better than e.g. macOS but recent windows actually can't even run a good number of other MS software of the 95 era.

Is it a Valve problem, or a Microsoft one at that point? Nevertheless, you could still download your game and remove the thin DRM layer (tools available to do so), and then play them on your Windows<10 machines.

Valve problem. Selling merchandise you know/stated the customer can't use is negligent at best, malicious at worst.

Obligatory IANAL.

Valve offers a generous refund policy. If the game doesn't work on your system, refund it.

Seems like the obligation falls on developers and studios. It’s Capcom’s responsibility to keep Street Fighter X Tekken working because Capcom is the seller. Fortunately the community usually warns buyers about abandonware and you can always get a refund.

Also if you're playing on Linux a lot of those older games run perfectly through WINE, better than they run on modern Windows.

wine is rolled into proton.

Please excuse me while I become 'that guy', but Proton is a distribution of Wine with a bunch of patches and extra components like DXVK. The vast majority of proton is unmodified wine.

“[Proton] is a collection of software and libraries combined with a patched version of Wine[….]”. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not an expert in Proton or anything. Thanks for the input though.

It’s the obligation of the developer to make sure their game runs acceptably on supported platforms and on systems that meet the stated requirements.

If Valve is offering supplemental support on top of what the developer is offering (eg: running Windows games on the Steam Deck via Proton), then its Valve’s obligation to keep things running, as the developer has never committed to keeping things running outside their supported platforms. That said, additional support from the developer (eg: Microsoft/343i for Halo, Respawn for Apex Legends) to get games running on other platforms is always appreciated.

It would be ideal but it sounds like too much runaround for Valve.

They recently dropped support for MacOS 10.12. They're cutting it close since many Valve games only work on MacOS versions <= 10.13

Apple hasn’t support MacOS 10.12 for four years. That Steam still supports it is amazing to me.

Have you actually used steam lately? They did something to it on Mac that made it reset to the store page every time it loses focus and gains it back. Including when you try to read the code in your mail to be able to login, or when entering 3d secure codes for a purchase.

Basically you can't use it without another device to check your mail/texts.

It's been going on for at least 2 months.

I use Steam regularly, I don’t game on a Mac regularly. To be fair I don’t think most people use Macs for gaming. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember. Apple has a tight grip on mobile gaming though, that’s a money maker for them.

> Apple has a tight grip on mobile gaming though, that’s a money maker for them.

It's not gaming if it has IAPs. I've given up on even reading about mobile "games" when they all went IAP. I'm too poor to afford that.

I don't play many mobile games but I tested The Battle of Polytopia when it was in beta and I still play it today. So it's not a complete loss. Android has solid emulation scene though.

Isn't that out of scope of the discussion? Valve doesn't provide the online game capabilities of title and cannot guarantee you will be able to play online to all sort of old titles whose published shut down the servers.

It’s within the scope of the discussion. Nintendo should centralize its games into a single universal platform like Steam. Now that Valve has a successful handheld console it’s even more relevant than ever.

I think most nintendo users are kids and most of the games are given as gift and purchased in cartridges anyway. And people want to be able to buy and sell their games second hand. The nintendo network really is about online gaming in the context of the nintendo DS products.

Kids and adults play Nintendo games. I played them as a kid and now I play them as an adult.

I am also an adult who played Zelda today.

And I said "most", not "all".

Yeah, I get what you’re saying but you’re incorrect. Kids 12 and young only make up 5% of their market. Most Switch users are 25 to 34.

Unless it’s a 32-bit Mac come January or a machine running windows < 8, in which case you’re screwed until you buy new hardware.

Which I’m fine with, but it’s not like Valve is magical somehow. If your machine isn’t still getting Chromium builds they can’t build Steam for it, you still need to buy new hardware. And the game consoles (less) often let you play old games on new hardware.

My Deck just runs all those old windows games using proton. I mean, Windows subsystems runs Linux. You don’t even need VMs anymore. It’s not magic it’s just portability.

Steam Deck compatibility is spotty at best for DirectX-8 games and older.

A few of those have been updated by the publisher to ship with DDrawCompat, nglide or dgvoodoo, but at large they require some tinkering to get them in a running state.

Excluding those who will never, ever work again due to copy protection systems (e.g., all those Games for Windows Live that never received a patch, those EA games still shipping with Securom) of all my games, circa 15-20% of them crash on boot. Nearly all of them are pre-Dx8 games, which basically run correctly only running on a recently unsupported configuration by steam, Windows 7 32bit.

With a little fiddling most of those DirectX games work on the Deck. Again not perfect but absolutely functional. And never say never, fans find solutions to dead games all the time.

The majority of my steam collection is games that will not run on the steam deck or Linux. Out of 15 I have, only three works on. YMMV but doesn't look like 'all' these windows games unfortunately. May be more of an issue with the type of games I like, i.e. Civilisation, Age of Empires, etc.

Civilization and Age of Empires definitely work on Linux. Or atleast civ 5, AoE2:DE and AoE4 all work. I strongly suspect most of the other versions work as well.

I actually haven't encountered a single game that doesn't work on Linux that's available on steam. I'm sure they exist, but I personally haven't hit any.

My biggest annoyance was when I tried to play Diablo 4 and had to mess about with the Blizzard launcher. Really made me appreciate how fool proof Linux gaming has become with Steam nowadays.

I have over three hundred games purchased on Steam, Windows games, and ROMs (GB to PS3) and I’ve only experienced one or two issues and it wasn’t the Deck’s fault. I play indie games on it all the time too. Now games are being made with the Deck in mind.

Maybe try adjusting the frame rate, wattage, and/or GPU frequency.

>in which case you’re screwed until you buy new hardware.

Windows 10 runs on anything that will emit a clock signal, and Windows 11 can be forced onto hardware it doesn't officially like.

I don't like Windows 7 support being dropped either, in large part because the dropping comes due to CEF used by Steam, but it's not like the hardware concerned becomes useless with no way out.

>Windows 10 runs on anything that will emit a clock signal

It runs extremely poorly on low power hardware. Poorly enough that I consider it unusable. Windows 7 ran fine on the same hardware previously.

Seeing as we're talking about games, low power hardware isn't necessarily relevant.

We’re talking about games still being playable years later though, so there is an argument that older hardware is relevant (relatively speaking, anyway).

Games built for Windows 95 not being playable because your hardware can’t efficiently run Windows 10 is a relevant discussion.

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