TrevMUN

And now, Putin's putting Russia's nuclear forces on alert in response to getting cut out of the SWIFT banking system. Now I understand what it was like to live in 1983, or maybe even the Cuban Missile Crisis. Most of us probably live close to a nuclear target. I know I certainly do, being in the Bay Area I'm surrounded by them.

I've tried it multiple ways; launching from Steam itself, launching from Launcher.exe, launching from CivilizationV.exe. No matter what I try, Steam will pop up an error saying "invalid platform."

As far as whether or not it would be worth it, I think that would depend on your priorities. You said you have a 980 right now, right? The TITAN Black won't be as powerful as that card, but it is the most powerful card that supports CSAA. Best I can advise is, compare the performance in those user benchmarks: would you be willing to take the performance hit for CSAA, especially at €220? Vintage gaming can get pricey when you've got a specific goal in mind, I've found. I'd mentioned wanting to build my own C64, but if I were to do that, I'd probably wind up paying the inflation-adjusted equivalent of a brand new C64 from 1982. (Which I think is, what, $1,700+ now?) I don't know how shipping and customs would affect the price, but maybe it might be worth checking international listings on eBay. I just checked and saw someone from Georgia (the U.S. state, not the country, that is) selling a TITAN Black for $189 (€166.61 at the moment). Granted, there's only three hours left on that one, but still.

Earlier this month I was able to get my version of Steam (Steam API: v017, build June 7 2017) to download updates from the Steam servers again! I edited my initial post to explain what it was I did (or what I think I did) which fixed the issue. While I've been able to test a lot more of my library since then, I've run into other problems that have caused some games to no longer be compatible. Some of them have fixable issues, others don't. So I expanded on my list and color-coded it depending on which games run fine, which games used to run fine and might be fixable/are fixable, and games which appear to flat out not work on XP anymore. Regarding that, can anyone who might happen to have Sid Meier's Civilization V on Steam confirm if their copy runs on XP32 or not? Because if it does, I may be running into an issue of Windows XP64 being locked out specifically, as happened with PSO2.

I think the most recent working build of Steam is from November 26, 2018. Even then, it requires that you keep your root certificates updated and importing converted (with PackageInfoConverter) versions of packageinfo.vdf from a current version of Steam.

Well that's the thing, @D.Draker was saying that there's a known issue with TITAN X Maxwells overheating on even small workloads. That nVidia forum thread he linked to had someone reporting extremely high temperatures simply idling in Counterstrike: Global Offensive's menu screen. CS:GO's system requirements aren't that much higher than those of Team Fortress 2.My TITAN X hasn't been overheating even on more demanding loads, which is why I supposed I'd lucked out. After hearing what California's state government's planning to do, I wouldn't be surprised at this point. I'm hoping I can eventually afford to move back to Texas. Alas, there's too many prospective employers who want people working out here rather than allowing remote work for jobs which don't need to be on-site. Oh, and FedEx has jerked me around of late, too. Corsair had to send me some replacement RAM and required signature verification. Even though I was watching and waiting, FedEx's delivery guy wouldn't even knock on the door or ring the doorbell to let me know he was here and just reported I was not at home. I called FedEx's support line about it and they said they'd have someone from the shipping center call me, but they never did. The delivery guy wound up just leaving the package by my door without notifying me. Only way I knew he did is by watching the tracking page like a hawk.

I'll say this much, I sorely miss when I used to live in Texas. I had to move out to the Bay Area due to my career, which I dreaded. I already knew ahead of time that the cost of living in places like the Bay Area and NYC eat away at whatever higher pay you might find working there. Gas is twice as expensive in the Bay as it was where I lived in Texas, though I've encountered places in California with prices higher still. From personal experience, if you're taking a cross-country trip that goes through the area where the borders of California, Nevada, and Arizona meet ... do NOT get gas at Needles if you can help it. (For posterity: as of this post, the cheapest gas there is $5.59/gal!) It's always seemed to be three times as expensive as what I was used to in Texas. Try and fuel up in Kingman, Arizona instead; the prices are much saner there. ($3.19/gal as of this post) Speaking of electric blankets, back in 2018 I lived in a different house where my room had a messed up window pane and thus my room typically matched whatever the outside temperature was at that point. One morning temperatures dropped so low outside that I woke up to find my feet mildly frostbitten! There's a place in the Bay Area called Excess Solutions that's saved my bacon, though. In addition to resale of liquidated company assets (so you can find a lot of old computer hardware, sometimes more recent stuff: back in 2020 they were selling a bunch of Aorus X570 Elite motherboards, I was very tempted to get one) and electric components, they also sell overstock of various products. I was able to get a Full-sized version of this thermal blanket for $15! It's been so effective at keeping me warm I haven't ever needed to plug the thing in. Recently Amazon snapped up the property Excess Solutions was located at, but thankfully, they've moved to a nearby location. More than I can say for Weirdstuff Warehouse; I'm still mad that I didn't find out about that place until after Google bought out the property and shut the place down. I would have liked to have seen it ...

I guess it depends on what you're willing to tolerate. I'm presently renting bedrooms in the San Francisco Bay Area, and our temperatures have been similar. It's 4:30 AM as I post this and right now the temperature outside is 48 F/9 C. During the day it's been getting up to around 65 F/18 C, though the indoor temps only ever get around 62 F / 16 C at most. The homeowner of the place I'm staying at right now, before his family left for Taiwan last December, set the HVAC set to 68 F/20 C. Even though the utilities were split evenly between the landlord and all tenants, my share of the bill was around $115~110 as a result. This winter I'd been trying to use the HVAC as little as possible (though when the house got down to 52 F / 11 C at one point, that was too cold even for me) and just let my computers do the work of heating the house. Our bills have been much, much lower as a result; I paid less than $60 last month.

95 C?! Holy moly. I guess I lucked out with my TITAN X Maxwell; I've had the opposite experience. Right now System Information Viewer said my card's at 30 C; ran a game of Quake 1.5 to see how it does under load with all the bells and whistles, and it topped out at 43 C. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard the fans crank up on this thing. Maybe I don't stress the card enough, though given that user's talking about seeing 88 C temperatures in CS:GO's menu, if my card had the same problem surely it would have already exhibited this behavior with my usual workloads ... It certainly sounds like your friend offloaded a lemon on you. But hey, why not make lemonade with it? The TITAN X Maxwell has 12GB of VRAM. You could take that defective card and any spare or old computer parts you have on hand, install something like HiveOS or ethOS, and run the machine as a combination crypto miner/space heater. Depends on your living conditions, of course. I did something similarly with a broken Radeon R9 380 I got on Craigslist. It's helped cut down on the need to run the HVAC, with natural gas prices being what they are of late ...

I found this site explaining how it works from a thread in 2014, though honestly even after looking at the referenced Proximotron itself I'm not too clear on how ProxHTTPSProxy solves the issues.

So far @heinoganda has been updating and revoking root certificates for Windows XP in conjunction with a certificate updating tool he's written. I can confirm that it does solve some issues with getting browsers to work; my XP32 laptop, Etesia, had been in RMA limbo for the better part of a year and when she came back, I found that some web pages like Wikipedia would not load in Chrome due to SEC_ERROR_OCSP_FUTURE_RESPONSE, which made no sense as her date and time were accurate. It turned out that her root certificates needed updating, and after that, any pages which refused to load due to that error worked as usual. EDIT: Ooooor I could have gone back a page and saw that you were just talking about heinoganda's tool. Whoops. @hidao, when this happens, are you getting an error like ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH? heinoganda has another tool which might help: ProxHTTPSProxy. I used it to solve the issue with FFXIV's web-based launcher adopting TLS 1.2 and thus not allowing XP users to log into the game a few years ago; I noticed when ProxHTTPSProxy is active that Chrome-based browsers could visit sites that normally throw a cipher mismatch error. (The Mario 64 wiki, Ukikipedia, is one example.) However, when ProxHTTPSProxy's running, any Firefox-based browser gets "security risk" warnings for any page you attempt to visit.

If it's any consolation, my Dad used to have a Commodore 64 that I loved playing around on as a kid, at least before I got introduced to the NES and SNES. One reason why I've been looking into all the projects to make new C64s, I kinda want to make one too. Emulation's a bit annoying given how the C64 keyboard layout is so different from the 104-key US QWERTY layout. When my Dad was still in the Air Force sometimes he'd sometimes take me to his office and let me play games on his IBM PC or mess around in Paint on Windows 3.1. Scorched Earth was one I remember the most. Not to mention, Apple has a reputation when it comes to letting users repair their hardware. Louis Rossman has been one of the most vocal critics on how Apple handles things. One of his recent videos on the current state of things. Making your own "Hackintosh" was viable for a while, though that might be a reason why Apple was motivated into developing their own silicon. This guy found that trying to make a Hackintosh comparable to current Macs in price ends up falling short in performance.

You'll probably want a TITAN Black, then, if you can still find one. From what I can see, that's the most powerful card which supports CSAA. You'll take a little bit of a performance hit switching from your 980 though. Perhaps if you're lucky to find two TITAN Blacks, you could run them SLI and make up for that. EDIT: In fact, I just went and checked eBay, and it looks like there's a handful of people selling them. As of this edit, there's three bids on someone selling two of them for $205 each.

If you're being offered a Titan X Maxwell for dirt cheap, I'd say go for it regardless. Based on user benchmarks you'll probably see a 25% performance boost. At any rate, my control panel says 8x is the maximum, and provides options for FXAA and whether or not to anti-alias transparencies (and if so, at what sampling rate).

What would the procedure be for doing that? I haven't been able to get around the ensuing Error 1012 that occurs when attempting to launch FFXIV's game client after using XomPie. From what I can tell, just having the XomPie DLLs present in SysWOW64 is enough to get FFXIV to run again, but only if the executable is pointing to XomPie's kernelxp.dll. Alternatively, using the zernel32.dll trick I learned from community officials for XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Enemy Within also works if the XomPie DLLs are present in SysWow64. But still, though the game will launch, attempting to get to the character select screen results in Error 1012 with either method. I did try completely re-downloading and reinstalling the game to a different drive, as some have suggested works when they encountered Error 1012 in the past, but it didn't help.

Hey @ntfoxy, I was curious since you've developed these quality-of-life programs; have you ever looked into/know the cause of why XP tends to shuffle the "z order" of programs/windows? It's a peculiar issue I've experienced on both XP32 and XP64, in which clicking on a program in the taskbar or alt-tabbing often causes a different program to pop up as active, completely unbidden. If you tab back and forth between programs a lot as I do, it can be an annoyance. I've been told it's caused by programs that launch in the background or start as minimized, but I don't think there's any real way of avoiding that. Using "Show the Desktop" sometimes mitigates the problem but more often than not, programs will just randomly Restore themselves.

There was a reason I had mentioned the kernel extension projects. The group working on OneCore API has had success getting the XP family of OSes to run DirectX 10 games. There's a few other screenshots like that on their site. I would have given OneCore API a spin already, but before I do that I plan on backing up my system just in case. And to be clear, I don't doubt that getting Cyberpunk to run on XP would be a tall order. It's not very high on my list of priorities, but hey; apparently CDPR provided some assistance to Windows 7 users wanting to run the game, even though 7 doesn't have DX12 support. It would be an interesting challenge to see if some combination of these tricks could pull it off.

I'm not sure. I tried looking up "PC2-5300S-555-12-A3" in hopes that maybe it could help me decipher what each part of that means specifically, but all the search results turned up the exact model of Samsung RAM in question. Curiously I can't find that module listed on Samsung's Product Finder, either.

The amount of memory your GPU has, I think, doesn't impact how much ram XP32 sees. The GPU's RAM is only used by the GPU. My XP32 laptop, Etesia, always reported around 3.5 GB of available RAM regardless of whether she had 4 GB or 8 GB, at least until I installed the PAE patch. Nowadays she reports 7.57 GB of RAM. I'm not sure but I think that's because XP doesn't count whatever memory is necessary for the system to run. Glancing through the CPU-Z report it appears that the RAM modules for both your XP and 7 laptops are both DDR2 and have the same clock rate despite the different sizes involved. I've often heard that it's not a good idea to mix and match memory modules of different sizes or manufacturers, however. Looking around online, it seems like this advice is only really applicable to older systems. Crucial's own website says: "Theoretically, if the other traits (generation, speed, latency, voltage) are the same, there should be no issue using DRAM from two different brands. Though some older DDR3 systems require matched sets of memory." The modules you have do appear to be of the same generation, speed, latency, and voltage. And it looks like your laptops already use a mix of modules from varying manufacturers, which suggests to me that you stand good odds of the 2GB RAM stick working in your XP laptop. I'd give it a shot; if you run into BSoDs where you had no such problem before, then it's likely the RAM doesn't agree with your system somehow.

The wi-fi USB adapters I have which work with XP are the NETGEAR AC1200 USB 3.0 WiFi Adapter (A6210), the ASUS Dual-band Wireless-AC1300 USB 3.0 Wi-Fi Adapter, and (most recently) a Panda Ultra WiFi (b/g/n) 150Mbps Wireless-N 2.4GHz USB Adapter which I bought because it's one of the few wireless adapters that also works with OpenBSD right out of the box, something I needed for an OpenBSD machine I'd been trying to set up. The ASUS adapter connects to the 5ghz band on my router just fine, and I believe the Netgear one would as well if I were using that at the moment but I've got it plugged into a different machine right now. The Panda one, though, is strictly for the 2.5ghz band. Be wary of that, since most wireless devices use that band, if you live in a suburb or urban area you're likely going to deal with network congestion on the 2.5ghz band. Also, I can't quite remember at the moment but I think in order to get the ASUS adapter working on my machine, I had to install Realtek's chipset drivers rather than ASUS' own. You'll want to locate the Realtek RTL8812AU Chipset drivers for it, if you go for that. I don't have a Windows 98 or Me machine with me at the moment, so I can't say whether or not these adapters would work for you on those OSes. However, you do have a third option if you can't do ethernet or wifi: powerline adapters. If you can't run an ethernet cable directly to the router, you can plug a pair of these into the wall sockets (one near your computer, one near the router) and then run ethernet cables to them instead. They'll transmit networking signals through the power lines in your house.

As an aside, I found out I know one of the programmers at CD Projekt RED who worked on Cyberpunk 2077. Not very high up on the totem pole, mind you, but when he found out that my daily driver is an XP64 machine it not only encouraged him to consider running an XP machine of his own for grins, but he also encouraged me to try and get Cyberpunk running on my XP64 machine given the TITAN X Maxwell can actually run the game decently (but not great). Said it would make me internet famous, haha. That being said, I think you and @Mr.Scienceman2000 have the right of it here. In some respects it's possible to get away with using an older OS to run current software, and for that we have to thank the people who put in the work to keep the older OSes relevant. @roytam1 and the gamut of browser forks he manages, the various extended kernel projects, etc. So, @Tonny52: look into the projects for your desired OS and see who's done what. Manage your expectations, but as Scienceman said, "don't give up using what you like just because someone told you to do so." EDIT: Oh, and because I hadn't caught up on all the posts and saw this afterward: From the perspective of what @UCyborg said, there's people who continue to use the older OSes (like myself) because there's enough people who do have the agency (the technical know-how, time to invest, etc.) to assert some control over and resist the planned obsolescence of older systems. I can't speak for others as to why they personally use older OSes, but I can say that for me it was a gamut of reasons. XP64 uses the least amount of memory of all the Windows 64-bit operating systems of which I'm aware, which was a big deal for me in 2007 when I made the decision to go with that over Vista. I still really like having as much control over the RAM in my system as possible, even now with my system sporting 128 GB of it. Also, I dislike Windows 10's telemetry. I of course took all the measures I could to minimize it on the hand-me-down Windows 10 system I have, but even then if I can do something on XP64 I'd much rather do it there. Windows 11's TPM requirements are also a turnoff for me. I can't be the only one who remembers the "Trusted Computing" Palladium FAQ from the early 2000's ...

Just an update for anyone who's curious, or for Tumagon or Skulltrail if they happen to read this. Still haven't heard back from either of them. I gave XomPie a whirl. It does indeed allow the FFXIV game program to launch again under XP, though there's two problems. One, no sound at all. This has been something reported even on Windows 10 machines with Endwalker's release, but the solutions provided don't apply to XP and so I'm not sure how to fix this. The more pressing issue though is that attempting to log into the lobby servers, I get an error that the game needs to be updated and it closes. People have run into this problem over the years and so I don't know if this is due to XomPie or just shenanigans from the Endwalker update. I did recently get a chance to test on a hand-me-down Windows 10 machine which previously had FFXIV installed, though, and that machine was able to launch the game. (Didn't test the sound, though.) Given my XP64 machine's the beefiest rig I've got, I'd very much like to continue to play FFXIV on that one, so I'll keep poking at this for a solution. I haven't yet tried OneCore API because I don't know how much it modifies the system, and how easily it is to upgrade or remove it since it's under active development. (XomPie, at least the version I have, does very little modding and can be easily removed.)

Shot him an e-mail. In the meantime, I grabbed Dependency Walker to determine what's keeping FFXIV from launching on XP. It looks like there's four APIs responsible: AcquireSRWLockExclusive, InitializeCriticalSectionEx, InitializeSRWLock, and ReleaseSRWLockExclusive. I dunno if @TuMaGoNx is still around, but would XomPie address the lack of those APIs or is this going to take a more extensive approach?

Oh jeez ... my condolences, Dibya. I know how it is to lose a parent; it took me several years to pick up the pieces mentally just from that. It's totally understandable to take time to process and sort things out. Is Samuka "Skulltrail192" on GitHub? I think I remember you said you incorporated your work on ExtendedXP into OneCore API a while back. Hoping things get better for you.

So back in July of 2018, FFXIV's web-based launcher started using TLS 1.1/1.2 (not sure which) which prevented XP users from launching the game. Per @i430VX's suggestion when I posted about this problem back then ProxHTTPSProxy solved that problem, needing only to be running for as long as it takes to use the web-based launcher and then you could play as normal. Well, later in January 2019 SquareEnix officially announced they would no longer support the Windows 32-bit OSes or DirectX 9 with their then-latest expansion, Shadowbringers. However, it wasn't a hard lockout; they just said "you can still try to run the game, but if you run into problems, we won't help." I was pleasantly surprised to find out that FFXIV could indeed continue to run on XP back then. However, the party's over as of today. The expansion that launched today, Endwalker, now uses APIs not present in XP. So even though you can patch and log in via the web browser, once you actually launch the game, you get this: I wonder if @Dibya or the crew working on extended kernel patches have tackled this particular API, but this likely isn't the only one FFXIV now uses which would prevent XP running the game.