If your box is old enough that it came with a 32 bit OS installed then there is a good chance it will have a very hard time running PA anyway.
I'll be the judge of that. I'm running XP SP3 32bit on 4gb of ram, MSI's Superpipe Nvidia GTX 285, and an AMD Phenom II 955 Quad which I can easily clock from it's current 3.2 to something like 4.0 on stock cooling. You have continuously stated that XP will not be able to run PA on the components it has, but the only true limit to XP while 32 bit is the ram limitation. Really now. A friend of mine is running Nvidia's GeForce GTX 660 on his XP. It's a bit more powerful than the GeForce 8000, now isn't it? I also have a friend running an intel i7 sandy bridge on XP. You're right about one thing. PA will likely need a lot of ram to run fluidly, which will probably be my personal downfall. If it does end up not actually working on XP, I can easily install 7 64bit on a second partition. But as I said before, be it working on XP or not, I'll be the judge of that.
Actually, the problem with XP is we've explicitly said we don't support XP. Supporting XP at this point is a very non-trivial thing to do. Not saying it won't run, but we made the decision that this is a Win 7 targeted game on Windows, with support for Vista, 7 and 8.
32-bit works and I can run it on my machine. It's getting it distributed that's hard. I'll go check on it now. <wanders away> <come back> Ok, so there are a few tasks being worked on that need to be done first. No ETA other than soon. - build a launcher stub that can launch either 32/64 appropriately (needed to make steam work) - modify our build system to create the hybrid build that has both sets of executables
Fair enough. That's a pretty dated video card but you might be able to run PA if you update your OS. Actually, as garat pointed out there are some other limitations as well that keep PA from running on XP aside from the 32 bit memory address limit. XP has a different kernel and network stack. This matters. I was talking about pre built PCs. If your friend built a box with modern hardware and bought an outdated OS for it that's his own fault. Your friend should be keeping his entire system, which includes the OS, up to date with current gaming standards. And he shouldn't be surprised when the fact some parts of box are over 10 years old causes issues running the latest games. This is fair. But if you can easily install 64 bit Windows 7 why are you running XP at all?
I completely understand the choice to not support XP, and am fully aware that it may or may not function. I've already accepted that I may have to install a new OS, and honestly, I'm just thankful I'll be able to help fund PA with the $200 edition this coming Monday. I'd buy it even if I couldn't play it at all. Game built by the company, funded by the fans, for the fans, and put together.. with the fans in mind. We, as a playerbase, even help SHAPE the game. That's something you don't see every day, and I'm damn proud to get behind something like that. Respect. Yeah, prebuilt PCs tend to not have the very high-end gpus, but that's the beauty of a custom machine. We also have CDs and dozens of codes for nearly any OS as computer techs. 95, 98/SE, 2000, ME, XP, Vista, 7, etc, so we don't have to ever buy an OS. Just components. You're right about XP having more than just ram limitations, but I was simply thinking of hardware alone. I should probably have been more specific, and I apologize for that. I do agree, though, that we should keep our systems with the latest OS... Unfortunately, my friends and I... we're all just hardheads. Windows 7 just does not have the customization of windows XP or 98 SE. (Believe me, if I had the time/money to rebuild it, I'd have a 98 SE just for that.) I'm partial to the older generation of games that were built for 98, but work on XP. Need for Speed 3, Red Alert, Diablo II, even oldies like Sim Copter/Tower/Streets/2000, etc. Hell, I even pull up Sim City Classic.. and that thing runs in dos. xD Also, Windows 7 and 8 are both based on giving the user less privacy (much more so in 8 than 7), so it's one of the reasons why I am severely hesitant to get either one. 7 I'll probably cave for. 8, not likely. I might give the RAMDisk a try. If anything, It'll give me more than 3.2gb of ram on the OS for doing other tasks. I might look into getting the paid version too.. with a 2tb HD, I could sacrifice the space for some extra ram. Too bad it won't ever be as effective as physical ram. I'm debating on if I should come back and state whether I got it working (post-Monday) once 32bit is released. I think at least a statement on if it actually works on windows XP 32bit, irrelevant supported or not, would be fair to the community, no?
Probably not Windows, but you can get a number of pretty solid linux distros that are working well with our game (Ubuntu 12.04 / 13.04 with a tweak, Mint 14 / Mint 15 with a tweak, and plenty of others). Great OS choices on Linux front now, but still for the more technically inclined out there.
For gaming I would recommend ArchLinux. It always has newest drivers, newest kernels and so on. It is a rolling release distro. The bad thing is that this distro isn't meant for total beginners. It's pretty much DIY. (tje good thin is that you could gain huge amounts of Linux knowledge).
