The day I lost all my games to DRM

[CYZLAK]

Story time. I've been here a long time. Since day 1, you could say. It was 2004. I bought Half-Life 2 near enough to release day. I bought the Gordon box art, in case you were wondering. Anyway, amongst other things, on the discs came Counter-Strike: Source, and Steam. I wasn't really interested in Steam at first, I was focused on performance and didn't want it "hogging all my memory" because I had to keep it open to play. Anyway, I sucked it up when they introduced friends lists, because I could spam memes to friends as I head shot them in-game, and all was well.

Fast forward to today. Through a friend, an old computer from 2003 falls into my lap. I spent some time thinking for a use case, and retro being a thing now, researched the hardware/software used during it's era, turns out Windows XP was the way to go. So I got myself an era appropriate beastly Geforce 6800 GT, and got to work. Oh the nostalgia!

This is when the ugly face of DRM raised up and made itself known to me. You see, Half-Life 2 came out in 2004. I was using Steam. Steam got known for crazy sales early on. Games like FEAR, STALKER, absolutely heaps of other games started releasing. We all had broadband by then, so could download a game overnight. And I was young with a disposable income. Practically all of my Windows XP era games are in my Steam library. And guess what? Steam doesn't "support" Windows XP anymore. Well I mean, you can go and find an old version of the Steam client and Steam installs just fine on XP, but then you have to log in. Apparently they turned off the Steam login servers for XP some years ago. Why? Who knows really. End of the day, the cruel fact that all of my games are locked behind a login screen, even if i burn backups to CD, is the grim reality I now face.

Steam feels more like a rental service now more than than ever. You just don't think about this when you're always on the latest and greatest Operating System. How can you believe you "own" of of the games you spend your hard earned money on? One day this could happen to you, login server disabled or fails, being the specific DRM that Steam uses, and you can say goodbye to everything. Almost 20 years worth of game purchases. Astounding.

If anyone knows a way around this, please let me know, I don't know if these forums have PMs as I rarely have stories like this, but if they do, hit me up. The only thing I can think of, is dual boot to Steam OS. I found out SteamOS supports really old hardware, like Pentium 4 era hardware, which as it turns out, is early Windows XP era. But I don't know the first thing about installing SteamOS on a PC, so more research needed there.

Have fun with your Steam games everyone, but just remember: you don't own them!

[Muppet among Puppets]

I still have the old pc case, and it makes the same sound.
Feels the same. Just can play newer games.

My old motherboard can not even run anymore, because powersupplies miss a -5 volt slot for a long time now. I would have other things to complain about when it comes to "play like in the past".
Strangely not, "need xp".

[CYZLAK]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Komarimaru:

If you want to experience a retro rig, then build a retro rig.

I... did? I built a Pentium 4 3 GHz, 2GB RAM, GeForce 7600 GS rig with Windows XP. That's what this whole topic is about. Welcome to it.

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από The Captain:

Those contradict each other completely. You want the retro feel of playing on Windows XP and dont want to play on a modern OS but your solution is to install the Linux based Steam OS that is only a few years old.

How does that make any sense?

You're right, it doesn't. It's two separate things combined sorry. I've been very interested in SteamOS becoming a solution to having a pure gaming PC and ditching Windows completely. Then because I found out it can run on a Pentium 4 (honestly surprising , but I'm not a linux guy, I guess they run on toasters) figured I can try it on my retro rig first, before modifying my win10 rig.

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Walach:

I believe that if something like a game only runs on operative systems that's no longer working with the client that they are on, then they should be patched to not need to use the client anymore. Seems like the decent thing to do. Like how people at Valve said that if Steam vanish, then they'd make it so people would still be able to play their games.

Finally, a reasonable suggestion. Honestly, shouldn't feel like I'm being punished because Steam was so successful it's still around 20 years later, which means games on the platform are considered Retro. I paid real money for these games you know. But yeah, nothing can replace boxed physical games, that's the take away from this experience.

Also to the guy who says its so ez to defeat safedisc / securom for games from that era that never made it to GOG, please do share the solution. WinXP by far and away was the most invasive DRM riddled era yet. I've literally had to disable my actual CD ROM drive in Device Manager to defeat the CD check and it accepting a mounted ISO. Absolutely crazy stuff I clearly forgot about. Oh and No CD cracks are riddled with trojans, already formatted once because of that lol, so that's no good.

[CYZLAK]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Crashed:

By the way most websites now (including the Store section of Steam) require TLS 1.2 which Windows XP doesn't have, and most XP-compatible browsers may not have up to date root certificates necessary to connect to secure websites.

This explains so much about the strange errors I've seen lately when browsing websites. They're really locking things down, I want to jump ship off the windows train entirely.

[CYZLAK]

Also: a few people have said "just use XP VM lol ya dummy". Yeah, so tried that first before building bare metal. Your typical VMs have no 3D acceleration. Best thing by FAR is "PCem", it's so accurate. It has full 3D Acceleration, so you can build a sick early Pentium with a 3DFX Voodoo 3 in software and it's beautiful with Win98. Problem is, that's the most advanced hardware it will emulate, and even with that setup, my rig was struggling to keep max frames at high resolutions. Unfortunately can't build a Windows XP experience with it.

[Muppet among Puppets]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Nomad:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Crashed:

By the way most websites now (including the Store section of Steam) require TLS 1.2 which Windows XP doesn't have, and most XP-compatible browsers may not have up to date root certificates necessary to connect to secure websites.

This explains so much about the strange errors I've seen lately when browsing websites. They're really locking things down, I want to jump ship off the windows train entirely.

You want to browse webpages that use unsecure encryption?
Using better encryption is not windows specific.

[Lunatix]

You will find your games without it with some research, nobody will blame you if you bought them.

[Komarimaru]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Nomad:

Also: a few people have said "just use XP VM lol ya dummy". Yeah, so tried that first before building bare metal. Your typical VMs have no 3D acceleration. Best thing by FAR is "PCem", it's so accurate. It has full 3D Acceleration, so you can build a sick early Pentium with a 3DFX Voodoo 3 in software and it's beautiful with Win98. Problem is, that's the most advanced hardware it will emulate, and even with that setup, my rig was struggling to keep max frames at high resolutions. Unfortunately can't build a Windows XP experience with it.

Not sure who lied to you, but a virtual machine has full access to your hardware, including your GPU.

[CYZLAK]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Komarimaru:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Nomad:

Also: a few people have said "just use XP VM lol ya dummy". Yeah, so tried that first before building bare metal. Your typical VMs have no 3D acceleration. Best thing by FAR is "PCem", it's so accurate. It has full 3D Acceleration, so you can build a sick early Pentium with a 3DFX Voodoo 3 in software and it's beautiful with Win98. Problem is, that's the most advanced hardware it will emulate, and even with that setup, my rig was struggling to keep max frames at high resolutions. Unfortunately can't build a Windows XP experience with it.

Not sure who lied to you, but a virtual machine has full access to your hardware, including your GPU.

Be that as it may, Virtualbox and VMware don't utilise 3D Acceleration, even though VMware actually lies and says to download some plugin to enable it. Most games either black screen on boot, don't start, or are a slideshow. It's awful. How can I possibly be lied to, when I've tried all these things myself and am sharing my experiences?

[Start_Running]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Dr. Death:

Jesus christ i cant believe people here dont understand the obvious problem here...

The issue isn't asking for steam to support XP forever. The issue is that you cant use steam permanently for your hardware/software even if it used to work fine at one point.

I wonder if with Linux the same issue would even exist since you can just reuse old libraries to make games run.

Yeah and if you read the SSA you signed, and the eulas you;'d know they have a claiuuse about that. I mean you can technically run the client on XOP still if tyou find an old enough install..but the issue is. that client is not going to be able to talk wityh the modern middleware, or backend which are required for functionality.

You know the funny thing is. WHy not just upgrade to W7. I mean lets be fair I've yet to see anything XP can do that 7 can't and when it comes to running games I've not seen one that doesn't actually run better on 7 than it did on XP.

[Komarimaru]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Nomad:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Komarimaru:

Not sure who lied to you, but a virtual machine has full access to your hardware, including your GPU.

Be that as it may, Virtualbox and VMware don't utilise 3D Acceleration, even though VMware actually lies and says to download some plugin to enable it. Most games either black screen on boot, don't start, or are a slideshow. It's awful. How can I possibly be lied to, when I've tried all these things myself and am sharing my experiences?

Can I ask which games for Either of them, that it gives a black screen? Since I've been able to play Heavy Metal FAKK 2 without issues, and it's one of the hardest to run in any virtual machine.

[Liquid Inc]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Nomad:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Komarimaru:

If you want to experience a retro rig, then build a retro rig.

I... did? I built a Pentium 4 3 GHz, 2GB RAM, GeForce 7600 GS rig with Windows XP. That's what this whole topic is about. Welcome to it.

tbh, why not just run win 10 on it? it'll run on on around 1GB of ram, unlike Win 7 which has a minimum of 2gb... You'll be up to date, and things will work..
I actually ran a standard Win 10 install on a laptop with an old manky celeron and just 2gb of ram. It actually gave it a new lease of life, compared to keeping it on Win 7 as the 2nd 2gb ram stick failed and made win 7 virtually unusable...
it was either upgrade to win 10, or wipe and try Linux etc..


Trying to get an outdated OS to run modern stuff will always be a gamble, and older games can normally run just fine (with some outliers) on modern hardware.... The games that don't are usually ported over, or rebuilt like Transport Tycoon was.

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Start_Running:

You know the funny thing is. WHy not just upgrade to W7. I mean lets be fair I've yet to see anything XP can do that 7 can't and when it comes to running games I've not seen one that doesn't actually run better on 7 than it did on XP.

Win 7 uses 2gb of ram, so that retro PC would be completely pointless on win 7. Win 10 uses less ram than 7, so would be a better choice...

[Bee🐝]

OK OP, while I get wanting to run something for those purely retro, nostalgic feels...XP is kinda an odd choice.

Usually, we run MS-Dos, 3.1 or 95 because there's an actual noticeable difference to running currently incompatible games on older hardware, but with XP...it just seems a tiny bit pointless? I can't think of a single XP-era game that I can't run on Win11 right now.

So you can do it for the feelz, but then you have to chuck modern Steam as a launcher fully. Maybe find CD-boxed copies of those games? Note, even then, your main issue is that by the time we got to XP, CDkeys were already well-established things, so you'll have to buy sealed boxes. Obviously, there are always games that are now freeware.

You can't expect Valve to keep really ol' ♥♥♥♥ lying around in case someone feels the need to go slightly retro.

Edit: Oh and obviously, retro copies are only an option with single-player games - I don't see 2023 anti-cheat playing well with WinXP.

Actually, this just feels like an issue for which the answer is GOG.

[Dr. Death]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Satoru:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Dr. Death:

Jesus christ i cant believe people here dont understand the obvious problem here...

The issue isn't asking for steam to support XP forever. The issue is that you cant use steam permanently for your hardware/software even if it used to work fine at one point.

That's sort of amusing when you consider that any day now Apple will basically destroy every Apple game on Steam once Rosetta2 is deprecated because the 'transition is over'

I wonder if with Linux the same issue would even exist since you can just reuse old libraries to make games run.

Maybe you forgot that whole thing where Ubuntu was going to kill pretty much 50% of all steam games by getting rid of 32 bit binaries?

I didn't forget. I just didn't know about it and that sounds awful. So does the apple situation.

[Dr. Death]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Start_Running:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Dr. Death:

Jesus christ i cant believe people here dont understand the obvious problem here...

The issue isn't asking for steam to support XP forever. The issue is that you cant use steam permanently for your hardware/software even if it used to work fine at one point.

I wonder if with Linux the same issue would even exist since you can just reuse old libraries to make games run.

Yeah and if you read the SSA you signed, and the eulas you;'d know they have a claiuuse about that. I mean you can technically run the client on XOP still if tyou find an old enough install..but the issue is. that client is not going to be able to talk wityh the modern middleware, or backend which are required for functionality.

You know the funny thing is. WHy not just upgrade to W7. I mean lets be fair I've yet to see anything XP can do that 7 can't and when it comes to running games I've not seen one that doesn't actually run better on 7 than it did on XP.

And how long will it be before W7 is supported? Then W10? Then 11?

[Muppet among Puppets]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Liquid Inc:

tbh, why not just run win 10 on it? it'll run on on around 1GB of ram, unlike Win 7 which has a minimum of 2gb... You'll be up to date, and things will work..
I actually ran a standard Win 10 install on a laptop with an old manky celeron and just 2gb of ram.

Its possible to run win 10 and ~1 other main thing on 2gb ram. More or less hard drive ram involved.
But if you run win 10 and steam, you dont have much space in your real ram left.
Win 10 and a browser with 1 tab, can be ok. 2 tabs, wrong page, not so much.

I use game streaming on such a computer. 1 thing, 1 tab at a time.