Building Principia for Windows XP

zamadatix

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!

tribal808

this is so cool people like you are keeping the internet alive

accrual

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.

throwaway2046

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

haunter

Legacy Update basically solves every post install update/driver issues https://legacyupdate.net/

anthk

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

NooneAtAll3

but what IS principia?

Aerocatia

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++?

catalogt1000

Implementing Wayland vsock DOS rendering AF_UNIX.

Borg3

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 ;)

asveikau

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.

Torwald

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