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- Hacker News
- but what IS principia?by NooneAtAll3
- 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.by sudobash1
- this is so cool
people like you are keeping the internet alive
by tribal808 - There's w64devkit too. Ah, well, mentioned.by anthk
- Implementing Wayland vsock DOS rendering AF_UNIX.by catalogt1000
- 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!by zamadatix
- Judging from the headline I thought this was a design doc for a OSS clone of WinXP, which would be a cool thing IMHO.by Torwald
- 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 ;)by Borg3
- 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. :)
by ROllerozxa - 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.by asveikau
- 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++?by Aerocatia
- 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.
by ROllerozxa - Legacy Update basically solves every post install update/driver issuesby haunter
- 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.by ROllerozxa
- 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.by accrual
- 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?by BoxOfRain
- I did a project on Windows 3.1 a few months back for fun. Borland C++ is still out there on abandonware websites.
- 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.by ndiddy