Will PA Run on Windows XP?

K so, I find your post sort of funny considering you did not read ANY of my posts on this thread thoroughly, if AT ALL, so I'll highlight the main points of which you so obviously missed.

Not only did I go into detail of the error I got, why I got it, what STOPS the program from working on XP, I even went into why it's better to run 7.

Already installed Windows 7 on my 2nd partition, already play PA, already loving it. I never asked for XP support, I simply defended it against those who clearly do not know it's prowess as an operating system.

I think with that said, that's /thread.

Do you know the difference between supported and compatible/runnable?

No? You can keep your Satan.

Fun fact. The newest AMD video card drivers no longer support XP: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/06/29/2235257/amdati-drops-windows-xp-support

Looks like new games won't run on AMD cards under XP going forward if they need the newer drivers to run properly. Granted most new games will probably run just fine on the old drivers for a while. Until new cards come out that is. It is a sign of things to come.

Can you guys stop going off-topic and just let this topic die in my View your post list? The question was clear, the answer was clearer. Now go and have your little discussions about XP in another topic.

Holy crap, this thread made me RAGE to no end.
I am among that rare breed of unicorns that uses XP x64.
Unlike what one of you said, this box runs many games, esp ones that are compatible with 32 bit XP.

I understand if they don't want to support an ancient OS, since that is time consuming and $$. They did specify that the alpha would not support XP, and I have no complaints about that. Maybe my brain is lying to me again, but I thought they said during the kickstarter that the final product would support XP at some level. It'll probably be 2 yrs before I get a new rig to go with win8 (win 7 costs 3x as much last I checked), and by that time PA will be $5 on some steam sale... during which time everybody will be gloating about how awesome PA is while I wallow in my pit of sour grapes.

Since it has already been demonstrated in this thread (thanks) that there's a hard constraint against 32 bit XP, it wouldn't surprise me that 64 bit XP would have the same issues. It's depressing that it's so difficult to even half *** it.

While I'm at it, perhaps someone can educate this noob on why new OSes are needed at all. As I understand it, an OS needs to manage 1) RAM 2) HDD 3) other hardware devices 4) GUI. 1/2 haven't changed much over the years other than 64 bit and that DDR3 thing. 4 has only gotten crappier. How hard can it be to support new hardware? Tell GPU to calculate something, it returns an answer. To me, it feels like a massive $ grab: ooh shinier thing! silly consumers, u must all get it!

I'm sorry to be so blunt, but I take it by that question that you'd be perfectly happy to still be running MS DOS? IBM OS/2?
Times change, technology improves.

The necro is forgiven for the fact you're running 64 bit windows XP

Current OSs do more than you describe, the biggest of which is security. An XP box can almost be considered compromised even before you plug the LAN cable in (I refer to 32 bit, 64bit is probably a bit better on account of it being so rare). Outside of security, new models and methods allow for greater feature sets or performance. Take the driver model first used in Vista - you no longer need to restart Windows to re-load a driver, and the way the OS buffers windows means if a program is hanging the screen doesn't turn white.

I have to disagree with you on 4; the hotkeys for windows management alone in Windows 7 make it painful to go back, and the taskbar is a massive improvement. Connecting to wireless networks is a breeze, and pinned items in jump lists makes finding documents so easy. (I won't comment on the Windows 8 UI disaster)

I'd forgiven the necro on the basis that someone actually did a search!

I'm not really sure what went wrong with DOS or the other super ancient OSes (GUI aside, at least). From what I recall, win95 crashed every hr or so, whereas XP crashes about weekly [a friend also said something about DOS only being able to run one thread at a time...]. I think stability is a reasonable desire in an OS. At some level, I'm probably a raging hypocrite for saying an OS "needs" to have certain features (which were at some point probably state of the art).

I guess I neglected to mention security (my friend says that XP boxes are compromised 30s after plugging the LAN cable in, but details lol). I guess those features are nice, but it does come at a price; the fancier the OS, the more system resources are dedicated to the OS and not stuff you want to run.

I'll probably forever regret not getting a copy of win7 before win8 got released. Now it's *** near impossible to get a legit copy of win7 without spending an arm and a leg. That being said, I recall that even win7's start menu was rather annoying. The submenus of XP's start menu would pop up a new column on the right, whereas win7 would pop it below, in the same column. This is fail when I want to browse things, sometimes 4-6 menus deep.

Thanks for your thoughts... for some reason I feel more calm... but I still think Sheriff should die in a fire XD

But this isn't true; performance on Windows 7 is at or above XP, even without turning off anything fancy. The exception is possibly very low end systems that can't use performance enhancing features like caching etc.

I used to think that, then realised I was using Windows 7 wrong. Being able to simply pin the programs to the taskbar (making it take 1 click to open in future), and the quick menu feature in the start menu (and jump lists) means I very rarely need to use the programs menu at all (and I use a lot of different programs), and anything else is a "Start, <type a few letters>, <enter>" away due to the search bar. It takes some adjustment, but in the end you might be surprised at how much faster the UI lets you do things.

Hi Greeves, as others have said unfortunately it wont work on XP...

HOWEVER
PA does support various version of Linux, which are free and generally pretty light weight compared to windows. If your computer supports windows XP, it will run linux. What's even better is that these days linux is actually reasonably easy to install, and supports 'dual boot' so you can put it side by side with windows (you get an option to select which OS you want on start up). The main requirement is having sufficient hard disk space for both.

Personally I'd recommend Linux Mint, or Xubuntu. Both include easy to use installers that will do all the tricky settings for you and you can even test them without installing (it allows you to run off the installation disk to make sure there are no compatibility issues before installing). Install one of them, then get the linux install for PA and your good (and all it will have cost you is some time)...

EDIT: PS Steam is also available on linux now (the number of games is limited but growing), I'm not sure if the linux version of PA is automatically available through steam or not yet though...?

PA work just fine though Linux Steam.

Still I can only recommend try Linux to people with Nvidia video cards. For owners of AMD GPUs it's will be nothing more than lot of troubles.

I've generally had less issues under linux with AMD graphics cards than Nvidia (try getting dual screens working correctly on an Nvidia card!!!!!).... Also since the latest linux kernel recent Radeon cards (anything GCN based) have gotten a big boost in performance. That said I haven't tried PA under linux so I don't know if there are some game specific issues people have been having?

Yes, PA was unplayable with proprietary drivers due to driver bugs for quite a long time. Currently it's working so-so, but still it's much better on FOSS drivers which is not yet suitable for newer hardware.

As long as I know RadeonSI still fail to run PA at all and proprietary drivers always was crap.

So I'm don't really want people to have bad experience with Linux because AMD can't create proper drivers.

Fair enough, although I think a decent AMD linux driver is in the works (if only because of steam os- this is partly why there has been a speed up with the latest kernel as the AMD driver team have been contributing to it)...

Either way I think in the case of anyone still stuck on Windows XP- linux is at least worth a try as it is after all free, AMD graphics card or not.

I don't believe in this. AMD don't even developed drivers on their own, they use 3rd party companies services for that. Their properietary drivers was crap all the time and I don't see any reason why those 3rd party companies will improve it's quality.

Their open source drivers it's right way for them, but it's just impossible to improve it a lot in short period of time.

AMD can't just drop money and get proper drivers first because each engineer who working on driver need to learn all documentation and hardware specifics, it's will months or years. E.g Intel have great drivers, but they have about 30 full-time developers who working on Linux graphics alone, but AMD only have 10-12 developers.

I guess you've delved deeper into Linux support than I have recently- in any case you might be interested in the following link (this is where I got the info from originally). Oddly enough I was mistaken on this being down to GCN, this is rather an improvement on cards prior to that (based on VILW 5 or VILW4 so spanning the HD 38XX cards through to the 69XX)...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_linux312_major&num=1

Either way improvement is a good thing. I used a Radeon 4670 under linux for years without issue (for TA Spring in particular) so this is why I'm surprised by all the hate towards AMD drivers on linux (as I've had far more problems with my GTX 560 under linux than I did on the 4670). Obviously I have no experience of what the GCN based cards are like though.

Hmm... I guess I just balked at the larger HDD usage :S The caching you're referring to is a feature on newer CPUs? ie Win7 is making use of a feature that only exists on newer hardware?

A very large part of it is simply that I like the old way :S Those are nice features, but there's no reason for them to be mutually exclusive with old start menu functionality. I've heard that the search ability is much better, but it doesn't help if I want to browse and have no idea what I'm looking for. eg I want to look through my list of non steam games that got dumped into start menu; or I want a particular software, but forgot its name

On the other hand, Windows 8 UI is just a piece of crap.