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I'm well aware of the security risks, but thinking of building a system just for old games -> I don't have any hardware worth trying new games on so no need for newer OS.

My question is if Windows Update is still working for XP? If I install it and temporarily connect it to the internet is it going to install all of the XP updates?

On second thought, maybe I should use something like wsusoffline...

It will still grab critical security updates but don't expect to get a service pack or anything like that, since support is completely shut down. Also, if the games will tolerate it, have you considered running it in a VM? More secure and a lot easier to recover from a major OS meltdown by having a backup copy archived.

Just run it in a VM. Hardware acceleration works more than well enough for retro gaming.

Any recommendations on what is best for gaming in a VM? I've used Virtual Box and VMWare, I'm not sure if one would be better than the other?

I've had great luck with VMware for old XP an Win98 games.

I'd actually suggest not running in a VM.
I personally have done side by side comparisons with an XP VM, running on Linux Mint (VMware Workstation Player vr 12.x) versus bare metal XP.
A lot of my older games, particularly, those that required OpenGL (Jedi Knight II/III come to mind), worked fine on bare metal, but had severe issues with trying to use the virtualized hardware acceleration. Hell, even trying to run The Sims 3 in a VM was horrible compared to bare metal.

I'd not worry about updates, as long as it stays off the web. Just install SP3, and the latest drivers for your hardware, and call it a day. This is what I have done for a retro Windows XP box.

Any issues running too much hardware on XP, like games that don't like a fast CPU?

I have a Core i5-750 and 8GB of ram, I'm aware that I can't use that in XP unless I run the bastard child XP x64.

It's more of an issue with the software in question. I'm only aware of games from the pre-Pentium days having issues with too fast of a processor.
With multi-core, you may have to set the affinity to core-0, other than that, shouldn't be any issues.

My retrox XP box is running games/software from about 2000-2011 vintage, without any issues.
My hardware is follows:

CPU: Phenom II X4 965 (3.4 GHz quad)
mem: 4GB DDR3-1333 (2 x 2GB config for dual channel)
Video: Radeon R7 265 w/2GB
Storage: Micron M500 480GB SSD

sircharles32 wrote:

I'd actually suggest not running in a VM.
I personally have done side by side comparisons with an XP VM, running on Linux Mint (VMware Workstation Player vr 12.x) versus bare metal XP.
A lot of my older games, particularly, those that required OpenGL (Jedi Knight II/III come to mind), worked fine on bare metal, but had severe issues with trying to use the virtualized hardware acceleration. Hell, even trying to run The Sims 3 in a VM was horrible compared to bare metal.

Odd. I've yet to find a game that doesn't work properly in a VMware VM, but I have to admit I haven't tried a huge number of OpenGL games but the ones I did try worked fine.

I'll fire up Jedi Knight later to see if they've fixed these issues.

EDIT: Jedi Knight 2 seems to have no trouble at all.

Waco wrote:

sircharles32 wrote:

I'd actually suggest not running in a VM.
I personally have done side by side comparisons with an XP VM, running on Linux Mint (VMware Workstation Player vr 12.x) versus bare metal XP.
A lot of my older games, particularly, those that required OpenGL (Jedi Knight II/III come to mind), worked fine on bare metal, but had severe issues with trying to use the virtualized hardware acceleration. Hell, even trying to run The Sims 3 in a VM was horrible compared to bare metal.

Odd. I've yet to find a game that doesn't work properly in a VMware VM, but I have to admit I haven't tried a huge number of OpenGL games but the ones I did try worked fine.

I'll fire up Jedi Knight later to see if they've fixed these issues.

EDIT: Jedi Knight 2 seems to have no trouble at all.

Seems reasonable. VMWare Player 12.x is more than 2 years old at this point, so they've probably improved the code base quite a bit in 14.x.

Now, I'm curious.
If there's success, please post the VM and version, as well as your hardware config, so I can see what it took.


Thanks.

VMware® Workstation 12 Player
12.5.7 build-5813279

Windows 10, 64-bit (Build 16299) 10.0.16299


Hardware config is listed in my sig. Ran Jedi Knight 2 perfectly at 1600x1200 with the newest available vmware tools installed and in-game settings maxed with "GL mode" enabled. With my old GTX 780 the experience wasn't much different.

Another vote from me for VMWare Player.

It's free, it's easy to use.

Well, I can already see that your hardware kicks the snot out of hardware I tested on.
I wonder if it only gives acceptable performance if you through very high hardware at it, do to software overhead/virtualization of the hardware.

I guess the point is that it is possible.

I've had great success using VirtualBox for an XP emulator. This is all games of DX6 an earlier or possibly OpenGL prior to 2 (certainly 3).

Anything newer than that and I would expect it to work in modern windows.

BobbinThreadbare wrote:

I've had great success using VirtualBox for an XP emulator. This is all games of DX6 an earlier or possibly OpenGL prior to 2 (certainly 3).

Anything newer than that and I would expect it to work in modern windows.

Probably, but I'd rather run anything of the DirectX9 era on XP for the nostalgia factor, and I can have one box for all my old titles. For newer stuff, if it's not on Steam I don't mess with it.

captaintrav wrote:

Probably, but I'd rather run anything of the DirectX9 era on XP for the nostalgia factor, and I can have one box for all my old titles.

Nostalgia for XP? Alot has changed with hardware during that time, but I wouldn't think the general overall user experience has changed enough to generate much nostalgia. Of course, I am getting older....

I'm actually a little nostalgic for the MS-DOS days TBH. One person could actually understand everything that was going on inside the PC, from the user interface all the way down to the physical hardware. I'm talking from a detailed technical/code standpoint, not just a broad brush high level view. IMO we started to lose that with early versions of Windows, and by the time NT came along it was hopeless.

just brew it! wrote:

I'm actually a little nostalgic for the MS-DOS days TBH.

I can't argue with that. It was nice knowing exactly what was going on.

Waco wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

I'm actually a little nostalgic for the MS-DOS days TBH.

I can't argue with that. It was nice knowing exactly what was going on.

ISTR Ars Technica running a story about TempleOS a few years ago but can't find it now. It also goes for the low-level hardware access experience and the reviewer found it surprisingly usable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

The author's certifiably nuts and he restarted his website from scratch recently, but the Wiki article's got a link to an archive.org version of the website that still had the TempleOS stuff up.

Definitely a vote for the VM route. Just be aware VMware needs a reasonable GPU in order to provide said hardware acceleration for games, an APU probably won't work well for DX9 level games or newer. My VM rig has a 750 Ti in it and that works surprisingly well for DX9 games, though I use Win 10 VMs these days.

I remember having to write the startup codes that would actually enable things like AdLib back in the day. Although it wasn’t all fun and games. IRQ conflicts were a pain, setting master/slave was more effort than it was worth. And having to sometimes manually enter the hard drive sector and other related specs when they didn’t auto-read was really annoying.