Man, stand your ground as long as you can, and enjoy your experience with XP. I envy you, 'cause I can't do it anymore due to various circumstances. XP is the best OS for an old school gamer (like me).

Thank you bro! It’s true that XP saves a lot of trouble when dealing with those good old games. Sometimes when I was skimming through those reviews, and seeing people screaming something like “doesn’t run on Win7/Win10!!! Need to modify this and modify that, and then...”, I’m like, what are you guys talking about?

People may say that every OS just has its strength and drawbacks, but yeah, I guess XP is just the best for us who enjoy those gogs the most.

I've created a guide on VOGONS for running games that require a client offline: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=64039

I can confirm that "The Signal from Tölva" is running without Steam on Win7/64 out of the box.
(The game is discounted a lot at the moment at fanatical).

Okay, I've added the few missing games to the wiki, and I also added Moss while I was at it. Sorry for the delay, it's been a busy holiday season. I hope everyone out there has enjoyed any holidays that they celebrate! :D



I'm this exact same way. I love the feeling of knowing that I've made a backup that will work forever, no matter what happens, completely untethered to an outside source. A while back, I started backing up any games I really care about to Blu-ray discs, because optical discs aren't prone to failure, like hard drives are. It's been a lot of work, but I now have just a couple of spindles of discs, and there's a countless number of games. It takes up barely any physical space in my house, and I know I'll be able to access them whenever and wherever I want to. It's a fantastic feeling.

You really believe this? In my whole life I had exactly ONE hard drive failing on me and countless optical discs.
You would suspect otherwise because of the fact that those HDDs will spin much more and on a regular basis but in fact the material the usual rewritable discs are made of in most cases is not the best and if you use external HDDs you usually have those stored away safely as well. At the moment I have five external HDDs - all functioning without any problems.

That does sound like a lot of work. I myself back up on hard drives as well for the most part. In case you're worried about failure, SSD's might be better. They might cost a bit more for a good one but they are reliable for the most part and faster as well. A large capacity hard drive might also work as they are getting cheaper too and they are just as reliable, maybe even more so but since you've already backed up on optical, those are good too. After all, I have a lot of music on my CD's and they have yet to let me down. It's getting harder and harder to have games backed up and playable without an outside source so I definitely appreciate efforts like these. Now more than ever.

About the DLL files, for now, I have managed to back up anything related to the files mentioned in both these articles, as it seems it will most likely solve the issues.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/dll-files-missing-errors/

https://www.fixwindowserrors.biz/blog/fix-different-dll-errors-pc-games

The fixes mentioned should fix most errors but sometimes old games have files that are harder to track down.

As for the DLL files I have backed up, it's 295 mb worth of files and I went that route to make sure I left nothing to chance but I have yet to test out whether transferring them would work on another computer.

I have the exact opposite experience. 3 HDD failures over the years. My friends have even more failures. some of my burned discs are 20 years old, still spinning like new. But of course burning is a lot more complicated. Every burner is different, works different with different software and you have to keep track which of the manufacturing plants are used for the blanks, because the company brand means nothing and the discs all come from the same country (taiwan or was it tailand? the Ritek plants (but there are different riteks, lol). So it is difficult, but for me it is worth it. HDD always fails some day, it is just the way it is. But i am happy for you that you never had much trouble with HDD.

It's admittedly probably more paranoia than anything, but yeah, I've had a few hard drives fail in the past. I've never had a disc drive die, though. You'd better believe that I have all of my bring-them-literally-everywhere games on a nice, fast external hard drive, though. :-D

I appreciate the info, I'm definitely going to look at this DLL stuff. I find it all really interesting.

And yeah, it's a bit of work to back stuff up the way I do it, but it's kind of a hobby, I guess. It's pretty automated, I just let the discs run until they're done, and burning them as I get games makes it quick enough.

Time for another bunch of Artifex Mundi games to be added to the list (all tested on WIndows 7/64 and all requiring to use the steam_appid.txt trick.

The Secret Order 5: The Buried Kingdom (574260)
Demon Hunter 4: Riddles of Light (762520)
Lost Grimoires 3: The Forgotten Well (740090)
Faces of Illusion: The Twin Phantoms (558340)
Enigmatis 3: The Shadow of Karkhala (495110)
Noir Chronicles: City of Crime (756500)

Ditto for Linux. :)

I've added those to the Wiki, plus the following games:

New Linux games
· A Normal Lost Phone
· Automata Empire
· Clustertruck
· Guts and Glory
· Regions Of Ruin
· Sundered: Eldritch Edition
· The Darkside Detective
· Trash Squad


New Windows games (tested on Linux with Wine set as Windows 7)
· Killing Room
· Miniature Garden
· Q.U.B.E. 2
· Radiant One
· Tiny Troopers (as explained in the Wiki, it can be made DRM-free by using an executable from a different Unity game of the same v3.5.6f4 runtime, like e.g. GOG's Blackguards)
· UNLOVED


Games confirmed on Linux
· Delver
· Demetrios: The BIG Cynical Adventure
· Heroine's Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok
· Master Spy (not available for Linux, but works with a native NW.js runtime)
· The Silent Age (Linux build now available)
· Time Recoil


Games denied on Linux
· Dungeon Defenders (it requires the client)


PS: Also, there was an anonymous edit that added Pillars of Eternity II for all 3 OSs without explaining anything. I'm not saying it's a bogus report, but I'd like to see any confirmation..

INK does not run anymore without the client - even the steam_appid.txt trick did not work. Will try to figure out which latest version still runs. I've tested for Win7/64. Maybe somebody should test the Liniux version as well?

Edit: Correction: It still does work but you WILL have to delete or rename the steam.exe in yout Steam directory. The steam_appid.txt trick also is not necessary after doing this.

I recently moved all the stuff I had on my old CD-R and DVD-R discs to external hard drives, and there were quite many (maybe 5% of them all) that had errors on them, some couldn't read at all. That gave me the impression that burned optical discs do have only a certain lifespan, even if you store them away (Finnish weather should be optimal for such storage, it is usually quite dry and cool here overall; yet I had so many failing optical discs).

But the main advantage of using HDDs for archiving is that they can keep so much data and are both fast and flexible to use. For instance, at the moment I am in the process of rearranging stuff on my primary 8TB external HDD, as I know there are lots of obsolete and redundant stuff there, and I also organize them in a better directory structure on the fly. The same would be quite hard with optical discs, having to reburn lots of discs over and over again etc.

Also, since I have all the data on one media instead of dozens or hundreds of discs, it is much easier to both find stuff from the archives, and also check that all the data is still ok (just run rhash or dvdsig verification on all the files on the bigass hard drive, and let it do its stuff on the background; it will tell if some file has a bad checksum so you can replace it from the mirrored backup). How do you test dozens or hundreds of optical discs whether all the data is still ok?

Yes HDDs will eventually die like all media, but they tend to warn about it beforehand. I had one hard drive that apparently overheated in use, but I started getting warning signs about it in use, and a simple S.M.A.R.T. analysis program revealed there are problems with the HDD, so I could copy all the data from it to another hard drive before I would lose it all.

The point of hard drives is not that you will keep all your data on the same HDD from here to eternity; the idea is that you will from time to time move all your data to newer media (usually meaning a newer and bigger hard drive). I did that just recently while I copied those optical discs to a hard drive, I also had some smaller and older 200GB-1TB hard drives with stuff on them, so I just copied all the data from them to my newer 8TB hard drives, in order to retire those smaller old hard drives and to have all my archives in one bigger media (instead of several smaller HDDs and optical discs).

If you go using RAID setups, then even better. It doesn't matter if one or two of your hard drives die, you just replace them and you still have all your data. For now, I am still going with the simpler "using several USB hard drives" method.

Just tested it on Linux, and the steam_appid.txt trick is not necessary with that version either.

Will edit the Wiki to reflect these changes.

Damn, man, your temptation was irresistible... I've somehow finally managed to make my external 1Tb hard disk (storing about 850 old games) work under WinXP, and having weighed all other Pros and Cons I decided :) Meet your prodigal son going back, WinXP family! Death to posers, old-school will rule!