Building Principia for Windows XP | Hacker News Reader

Building Principia for Windows XP

voxelmanip.se

120 pointsLorenDB34 comments

This is super cool! I admire those who make the effort to keep their software running on old unsupported OSs. There's a thriving community of new and existing XP users and I don't see it going away despite it being out of support for over a decade. It's one of the last great Windows versions and its long life ensured a huge software catalog is available for exploring, now including Principia.

I've not used Windows in a very long time so forgive my ignorance, but I always heard that it was a bad idea to connect an XP machine to the internet because of the amount of malware sloshing about. In practice is that much of a problem for modern-day XP enthusiasts?

The kind of passive infection that is shown in popular videos like this one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uSVVCmOH5w) tend to only happen if you hook up an XP machine to be directly accessible to the Internet. Like, if you connect your XP machine to your router sitting in the middle of your Internet connection and don't forward every port, you should be fine in that regard at least.

There is also Supermium which is a relatively recent version of Chromium backported to run on Windows XP with all the security patches that brings, but with that being said I still would not do anything security critical on it.

Yeah it was more of a problem back in the day when dial-up and DSL were more common, and home users would often have their computers directly connected to the internet if they didn't have multiple computers and a router. This was especially problematic before XP SP2 came out with the firewall enabled by default.

There were 2 separate risks bundled into this folklore.

One was it was common enough of to have a home internet setup without any inbound filtering external to the PC. That'd be nearly unheard of nowadays as nearly everyone has a router configured to perform as stateful firewall (the out of the box config of a home router, this system being the same underlying system that builds the session table for masquerade NAT). So you can have your XP machine sit there until the cows come home, nothing external is going to scan it anymore.

The other is just general "having internet access means malware can upload your information and download more malware". In practice for hacking with XP these days, that's "do you trust whatever you're copying over to mess with" and not an issue.

The only combination I'd caution against is "using XP as a daily driver for internet browsing" as there are unpatched security bugs in XP malware can target which don't require you to click anything, even in the somewhat more modern browser offerings. Even then, it's still just a matter of "how much do you care if this machine & the data on it get hacked" vs "how much do you want to do it that way" just like any other security question. There is no such thing as a universally agreed line on how much constitutes a bad risk in security.

What do people use XP for these days? I found it frustrating to use when it was new because of how often the system would lock up even on decent hardware (although being able to draw pictures with the frozen windows was sometimes fun). When 7 came out, I found that it usually ran better and froze less than XP even on XP era computers, although you'd have to upgrade your RAM.

I assume most people who use XP (which by default means non-hobbyists) are using it to run some software that was made to run only on it and the people who made said software never bothered to update the software for another OS. Something like a software application to manage prices in some family-run grocery store or warehouse in a former socialist country or what have you. The people using XP don't know they're even using an old OS, and they're oftentimes not very technical people (to say the least). They're using it because it's their job and they don't care particularly about it. It's usually not connected to the internet

Recently I went to the dentist, and while they weren't using XP, they were using Windows 7 to run some in-house software (I assume) to check my insurance

Yes, im from a former socialist country

I've seen some recent examples of XP in the wild, they pop-up occasionally in old ATMs, bus route displays, small stores running a PoS, etc. Not a recommended configuration of course but still happens nevertheless.

For me I enjoy it as a fun/hobby OS. I can install all my favorite tools and games and boot it up whenever. It's also fun to see what modern work can still be done on old OSs. Recent versions of PuTTY work so I can in theory sit on my XP box and drive LLM agents with Winamp playing in the background, chat on MSN with Escargot, etc.

"What do people use XP for these days?"

Hacking.

I currently have DX12 operating on XP-x64 (basically consumer 64-bit Win Server 2k3) with some minor hardware recognition issues. I have many modern games running this way. Many of them run much faster under XP than under their officially-supported OS (Win10+) which is an absolute shame.

That's interesting, how did you get that to work? I imagine you'd also need to somehow get device drivers for a newer graphics card to run (as well as for newer hardware in general if you don't want to be CPU bottlenecked). It seems like a lot of really cool work. Have you posted about this anywhere?

"That's interesting, how did you get that to work?"

Lots of registry modifications and .ini file modifications, and a huge chunk of help from someone who is currently making modern browsers and various modern software bits work under Windows98.

"I imagine you'd also need to somehow get device drivers for a newer graphics card to run"

That part is a bit more trivial thanks to unified driver architectures for GPUs. Not much more trivial, but a little.

"as well as for newer hardware in general if you don't want to be CPU bottlenecked"

CPU is the primary issue I'm having, indeed. Chipset drivers are the second biggest issue.

"Have you posted about this anywhere?"

And have Microslop banging on my door with lawyers because I show how modern versions of AI-slop-coded Windows are actually slower than older versions coded by actual humans? I'm good on that one boss.

> And have Microslop banging on my door with lawyers because I show how modern versions of AI-slop-coded Windows are actually slower than older versions coded by actual humans? I'm good on that one boss.

I highly doubt they care about anything people do with old versions of Windows. The full XP and Server 2003 source code has been on Microsoft owned Github for years now.

I remember noting how many of my games ran worse back in 2009 when migrating to windows 7. Most people discredited it as nvidia drivers being worse due to the new vista driver model (wdm or whatever), but I was never convinced.

> I found it frustrating to use when it was new because of how often the system would lock up even on decent hardware

Kids those days. Windows "release version" was actually a beta version. NT 4 needed 6 SPs to become stable, Win2k needed 4 SPs and XP needed 2 SPs.

I did a project on Windows 3.1 a few months back for fun. Borland C++ is still out there on abandonware websites.

Open Watcom is still actively developed! Worth looking at.

Legacy Update basically solves every post install update/driver issues

https://legacyupdate.net/

Legacy Update is really a godsend, props to the people maintaining it. The only driver I actually had to install manually via USB was just the Ethernet controller, and then after that was done I could just go online to Legacy Update and let it sit and download and install the rest.

FYI if you have the MSVC redistributable 14.27.29114 you can use UCRT executables built with modern Mingw-W64 on Windows XP, and curl 8.18.0 will work too (microsoft removed the link but I found it on the PC gaming wiki). I never had to deal with GetDynamicTimeZoneInformation() for my stuff, but maybe it only is a problem if you use the related code and don't static link libstdc++?

Yes! I have heard there is a redistributable for getting UCRT installed onto Windows XP, but it seems like quite an obscure update. The idea was to basically make a version that would work on a relatively up to date SP3 version at the very least without system changes, so going with msvcrt instead sounded like the best idea. Otherwise I've heard there are other community-made patches that basically turn XP into more like Windows 7 compatibility wise (One Core API?), albeit with some caveats - I haven't tested whether the modern Principia Windows builds would work under such a setup.

As for GetDynamicTimeZoneInformation, yes it probably would disappear when doing static linking as Principia does not use it. However initially I was building the game with all the dependencies and libstdc++ as DLLs, but ended up linking it all statically after I had to statically link libcurl with mbedtls anyways.

Yeah, wanting to support a vanilla installation is a valid reason to stick to MSVCRT. Just watch out for those silent footguns like the %zu format specifier not existing, haha. I have not tried One Core API myself either as I personally draw the line where it is reasonable to expect people to use officially released runtimes.

A few years ago I had a C++ project going (one man project, it had a GUI) that I was testing on WinXP. I found it was fairly easy to maintain a binary that loaded on XP using VS2015 as my compiler. I sometimes had to patch libraries to not depend on Win7 era APIs, but it was a small task.

Excellent write-up. Does anyone have the source of the background image shown in the last screenshot?

It's the background image for the Overgrowth theme in Acmlmboard 2.5, an old niche forum software. Here is a preview of the theme on one of the remaining boards running it: https://board.kafuka.org/?theme=overgrowth

You can also find it as the background image in the retro zone of my website, which is made to look like said theme from Acmlmboard: https://voxelmanip.se/retro/ I thought it would be very fitting to use as the wallpaper when I wanted to take the screenshot. :)

I actually wanted to try it (maybe I will do), but on github page I read its experimental and lots of dialogs arent implemented. So a bit shame it cannot be fully ported. Maybe I will take a bite and try to build it using my dated mingw gcc 4.9 ;)

Judging from the headline I thought this was a design doc for a OSS clone of WinXP, which would be a cool thing IMHO.

How on earth have I missed the existence of this physics game for the last 12 years!? It even has the option to play levels directly in the browser!

Implementing Wayland vsock DOS rendering AF_UNIX.

There's w64devkit too. Ah, well, mentioned.

this is so cool

people like you are keeping the internet alive

but what IS principia?

It is linked at the top of the article. It is a physics-based sandbox building game. Back in the day it was commercial, but it was abandoned a while back and somewhat more recently released as open-source.

It's also the name of an n-body physics mod for Kerbal Space Program.

https://github.com/mockingbirdnest/Principia

Is it like Garry's mod?

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