Can I get Steam to work on XP at all?

[KING OF THE DIRTY DANS]

Yes, I am aware support for xp is cut

The problem is, that Half-life 2 needs steam, even if you have an old physical copy.

Since I have a high end XP machine, it would be nice to play more games on it. 

Does anyone have any ideas?

 

[aisle9]

I have yet to see a way to make it work. I think Linux Steam is as close as you can get at this point. The removal of XP from Steam support has really hurt the viability of XP retro builds. Mine's only useful because of how freaking many physical games I have.

[NeuesTestament]

Why do you want to play it on an XP machine? Just for the nostalgia?

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 minutes ago, quakeguy81 said:

I have seen Youtube videos of older Steam builds (pre-2019) running on Windows XP.  My question is, what can XP do that Windows 7 or 10 can't?  Unless you just like running XP for the aesthetics or you don't want to pay to upgrade.

Valve's web client is based on Chrome, and because Chrome doesn't support Windows XP anymore, it naturally follows in Valve's insane troll logic that Steam shouldn't either.

 

1 minute ago, NeuesTestament said:

Why do you want to play it on an XP machine? Just for the nostalgia?

While Half-Life 2 runs fine on modern systems, some other games may not. Especially if they didn't bother updating them to account for things that were deprecated or just don't work in later Windows releases.

 

2 hours ago, aisle9 said:

I have yet to see a way to make it work. I think Linux Steam is as close as you can get at this point. The removal of XP from Steam support has really hurt the viability of XP retro builds. Mine's only useful because of how freaking many physical games I have.

Want to know something even more ironic? I built a Windows 98 machine and I figured my GOG library would be perfect for it. Except the GOG installers refuse to run on it, claiming I needed a newer OS.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Just now, quakeguy81 said:

If you have a Linux PC sitting around you can use a tool called innoextract to dump all the files out of the GOG installer and use them on a Windows 98 PC.  I've used it before to get my GOG games running on Linux using dosbox, scummvm, etc.

I installed it on my main machine and transferred the files over.

[PlayStation 2]

I’ve got an old ass build of Steam from 2014 that could potentially be used if you want that.

[Mira Yurizaki]

20 minutes ago, handymanshandle said:

I’ve got an old ass build of Steam from 2014 that could potentially be used if you want that.

They'd have to log in, which would trigger Steam wanting to update itself (and I'm pretty sure Steam will refuse to run if it knows it can be updated)

[PlayStation 2]

18 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

They'd have to log in, which would trigger Steam wanting to update itself (and I'm pretty sure Steam will refuse to run if it knows it can be updated)

I think you could transfer the ssfn file that Steam uses to log in and go from there. I know that’s a method some scammers used to basically lock people out of their accounts with, but I’ll need to test it myself.

[Guest]

Try a no-steam patch if there is one. Available for most pirated titles

[Acedia]

On 4/15/2019 at 5:43 PM, Mira Yurizaki said:

Valve's web client is based on Chrome, and because Chrome doesn't support Windows XP anymore, it naturally follows in Valve's insane troll logic that Steam shouldn't either.

Because that's totally the reason why they stopped supporting it and not the fact that they'd have to dedicate ressources to supporting a depcreated OS nobody should be using anywhere anyways anymore.

You do realize that on XP machines just visiting websites get you infected? No need to download anything or opening any files. And (yes I am channeling the WAN show here) this could make you one of the nodes in a Botnet attacking other people.

[Mira Yurizaki]

3 minutes ago, Acedia said:

Because that's totally the reason why they stopped supporting it and not the fact that they'd have to dedicate ressources to supporting a depcreated OS nobody should be using anywhere anyways anymore.

You do realize that on XP machines just visiting websites get you infected? No need to download anything or opening any files. And (yes I am channeling the WAN show here) this could make you one of the nodes in a Botnet attacking other people.

Valve said it themselves (second paragraph)

[reniat]

10 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Valve said it themselves (second paragraph)

To be fair, there's a difference between "We have an embedded browser in our desktop app so compatibility is affected by chrome" and "We are stopping our support for our desktop app because the web app won't work".

 

It's not troll logic, it's just how a lot of desktop apps are made nowadays (with web components in an embedded browser). 

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 minute ago, reniat said:

To be fair, there's a difference between "We have an embedded browser in our desktop app so compatibility is affected by chrome" and "We are stopping our support for our desktop app because the web app won't work".

 

It's not troll logic, it's just how a lot of desktop apps are made nowadays (with web components in an embedded browser). 

But how much does Chrome represent the core software product? Because if it's only the web browser and chat component and not the core functionality of managing your game library, then I don't see why Valve can't release a stripped down version that doesn't include the web and social aspects of the platform. Or why they can't allow Steam to run anyway on XP, just with the caveat that you're on your own if you do.

[reniat]

3 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

But how much does Chrome represent the core software product?

It might be significant portions of the desktop front end, it might not be. It's kind of hard to say without looking at the source. Think of stuff like spotify or slack: that UI is 100% embedded web components, so if you were on an environment where those product's embedded browsers didn't work correctly, you'd have serious issues supporting that platform.

 

Embedded browsers aren't just for "web" parts of desktop apps nowadays (look at stuff like Electron apps)

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 minutes ago, reniat said:

It might be significant portions of the desktop front end, it might not be. It's kind of hard to say without looking at the source. Think of stuff like spotify or slack: that UI is 100% embedded web components, so if you were on an environment where those product's embedded browsers didn't work correctly, you'd have serious issues supporting that platform.

 

Embedded browsers aren't just for "web" parts of desktop apps nowadays (look at stuff like Electron apps)

Electron is basically Chromium stripped of the normal UI, connecting to a localhost server that feeds it web pages. It doesn't necessarily have to pull pages from the web like a browser does. And while yes this system does make it vulnerable to the same types of attacks that a normal web browser could have, I don't believe this is what Valve uses. It's their own homespun UI, using Chrome whenever it's convenient.

 

Either way, is there literally anything preventing Windows XP from running the latest Chromium? Because as far as I can tell, there isn't.

[reniat]

9 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

I don't believe this is what Valve uses

I'm not saying it's electron specifically, i'm just saying it's not impossible for them to have other critical UI components being used in this manner. Some of the software I work on does a similar thing, where we are uplifting a gigantic legacy desktop application to use web components one workflow at a time using embedded browsers and our own translation layer between the two. It's also entirely possible that valve is just being lazy or ignorant towards XP users I don't know, I'm saying it's possible based on their response that there is a more valid reason to not support XP than is obvious on the surface without seeing the source. It could also just be them being dicks Idk.

 

9 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Either way, is there literally anything preventing Windows XP from running the latest Chromium? Because as far as I can tell, there isn't.

This I have no answer for lol. Perhaps the embedded browser they use is actually just a fork of chromium that has further XP compat complications? I really have no idea.

[Mira Yurizaki]

5 minutes ago, reniat said:

This I have no answer for lol. Perhaps the embedded browser they use is actually just a fork of chromium that has further XP compat complications? I really have no idea.

Having a look at the project, the XP version is based off an older code base. So sure, there's probably something in the newer one that's preventing XP from running it.

 

Either way at the end of the day, Valve not providing a way to go back and forcing everyone to go forward is dumb.

[Acedia]

39 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Valve not providing a way to go back and forcing everyone to go forward is dumb.

No it's not. Having Steam work partially is resulting in either somebody chosing an option to include it, potentially stifling innovation, or people demanding support for it, both of which cost ressources. It's the smart decision to flat out tell people "You are using an outdated, unsecure system. Stop it. We won't support it."

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 minute ago, Acedia said:

No it's not. Having Steam work partially is resulting in either somebody chosing an option to include it, potentially stifling innovation, or people demanding support for it, both of which cost ressources. It's the smart decision to flat out tell people "You are using an outdated, unsecure system. Stop it. We won't support it."

What I'm not proposing is Valve maintaining XP support on newer versions, but letting older versions of Steam be accessible for people who, like in OP's case, want to build an XP machine because they have a sizeable library of games compatible with XP that don't play so kindly to newer versions of Windows. They don't have to support older versions (not that Valve has any semblance of decent customer support to begin with).

 

It's not like the account data retrieval or game downloading system should need anything special from either newer web standards or OSes.

[KING OF THE DIRTY DANS]

Sorry I was gone for a day

I was wanting to play HL2 on hardware from its era

So if I want to do that now, I guess got to crack HL2

 

Thanks for all of the input