Age of Mythology Extended Edition in Windows XP

Five years ago I made xompie (which is nothing original) and one of its part is wined3d, but sadly because of my Intel HD has crappy OpenGL driver, wined3d never really works for me.

Now replacing my old ivybridge mobo with another ivybridge (optiplex 7010) mobo with 16GB and nvidia GT 730, I could run AOM EE with wined3d.

aom ee run in xp

basically just need d3d11.dll, wined3d.dll, dxgi.dll and gdixp.dll dropped in the game directory, but the developer add OS version check in aomx.exe which I think could be solved with MS Application Verifier that lies about windows version, or else using IDA I found the game filter out OS that older than NT 6.0 (Vista need SP2 for DirectX 11), patch can be peformed using hex editor at offset 1618813 by changing 06 into 05 (the version major) now it will filtered out anything older than Windows 2000. Also aomx.exe has PE subsystem version of  6.0 so we need to fix that to 5.0 as well.

Additionally it appears that cursor initial coord by wined3d is wrong, therefor mouse has offset. This only happen in fullscreen mode. To fix it we could create override config file in .\startup\user.cfg and put these lines:

xres 1280
yres 720
+window

That's it. well I'm not really a gamer but if there is a game that I play a lot in the past that would be Age of Mythology.

Final EOL of Java 7 download for Windows 32-bit

 As pointed out in Oracle blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/java/post/java-se-7-end-of-extended-support-in-july-2022

The final update for Java 7 has been released, one of openjdk vendor (probably the only one) Zulu provided installer (and zip) for 32-bit Windows:

https://cdn.azul.com/zulu/bin/
look for zulu7.56.0.11-ca-jre7.0.352 or zulu7.56.0.11-ca-jdk7.0.352, both 32-bit and 64-bit provided, and are compatible with XP too, make it theoretically most "secure" java for this platform assuming your jar can run with it.

Big World Map template for free

I made big Cahill-Keyes projection template map here:
https://archive.org/details/bmng_1px2500m_worldmap (10MB, 16000x6277 RGBA webp)
rev1 https://archive.org/details/bmng-ck-16k-1px2700m (15MB, 16000x7524 RGBA webp / RGB jpg)
rev2 https://archive.org/details/megamap (58MB Megamap, 68MB Wegamap Jpeg only, PNG is too big)

It may not be suitable for printing at all considering how dark it is, though the original BMNG was even darker but hey thats how our earth looks like. It is intended to be the biggest relatively proportional (globe-like) map viewable by 32-bit image viewer on computer :) and you can start ask yourself where is ukraine?

Anyone could use it as background and start laid textual information over it, and then export it to pdf. The free MS expression design can do that nicely, but the image need to be converted to png first.

Big thanks to https://github.com/jkunimune15/Map-Projections for providing CK map generator! back then it was tedious process to generate one using perl script.

EDIT:

First revision released:
- typo of scale, 21600/16000 * 2000 = 2700 duh
- add antarctica bedrock map at 0m (sea level) in grey shade
- make population shade more visible
- fix bathy error due to blending mode
- add land attachment for Antarctica Greenland, Russia, Iceland, Solomon and Kerguelen per keyes' megamap spec but not for closely separated land

Second revision released:
- target 1px=1000000 hence "mega"-map now, sadly it getting harder to open the file on 32-bit Windows.
- redo relief bump and shadow with more exaggerated downsampled 15-arcsecond SRTM dataset
- use SEDAC 2020 30 arc-second dataset for population density
- added river "hint" in glowing green
- redo more accurate sealevel bedrock map of antarctica (it may not bigger than australia)

Tools used:
gdal, paintdotnet (and many of plugins), expression design and vips.

C++ standard, Runtime and XP

C++ standard has been evolving much more like Java, or rather no more like C evolution, C++20 module remind me of Java 11 it make C++ "appreance" no more like what it used to be... I wonder how far Windows XP could get the lastest C++ standard toolchain. Lets revisit C++ standard progression

C++98 (formally C++03) has been what XP supported by Microsoft (with its peculiarity and quirks) from the free VS2005 to 2010 express editon.

C++11: GCC 5 (2015) Clang 3.8 and Embarcadero BCC 10.1 (2016) MSVC 2015
C++14: GCC 5 (2015) Clang 3.4 (2014) MSVC 2017
C++17: GCC 11 (2021) still missing from_chars FP mode because Win32 has no uselocale()
             MSVC 2019 16.4 shared_mutex (not available in XP target, only C++14 shared_timed_mutex)
C++20: MSVC 2019 16.10 (2021) since 16.8 its runtime breaks XP for the first time (last: 14.27.29114)

While those compilers arrive at the same state around 2015, now we see Clang lagged behind, GCC is struggling and MSVC is geting faster and faster.

In Windows XP context though, GCC seems the only hope for any "sort of" C++20 support considering they have the principle of having as cross-platform as possible rather than as native as possible codebase. Clang libc++already break XP when implementing C++17FS.

How about C runtime?
Now called UCRT, apparently it also strangely break XP too. Being versioned as Windows SDK's the last XP compatible is 10.1.18362.1, starting with 10.1.19041 ucrtbase.dll through api-ms-win-core-memory-l1-1-0.dll redirector is asking dll.VirtualAlloc, dll.VirtualQuery and dll.VirtualProtect from kernel32.dll which previously not prefixed with "dll." weird... Note that Visual C++ runtime installer usually bundled with much older 10.0.10586 UCRT (from Windows 10 1511).

Strange Adventures in Infinite Space SDL edition

 SAIS is unusual space strategy  game for its time, it opensourced in 2005 and then modernized at github as well as no longer run on XP. It was one of many tiny XP-era games that I collected. I take the SDL1 version source and compiled it, put the full game data and noise-filter the sound files to make it less annoying... is that what the author thinks of void space noise :(. Since this one is SDL based it is now run windowed! yay.

download: sais-1.5.0_sdl1.7z (2.8 MB)

TTFEdit simple true type outline editor

This little gem is made by japanese programmer Yuno dated back to 2003. This is an opensource software, its borland c++ source sadly never archived : http://uri.sakura.ne.jp/~cosmic/yuno/download/ttfeditsrc.lzh. You could open and edit ttf font or create it from scratch, there is also reference image feature that help you trace existing bitmap text sample or hand-drawn font.

I have bing translate this app into english (using resource hacker). As the name implied only ttf format supported, no fancy modern web fonts format, no opentype just TTF.

TTFEdit show Panose spec property

This outline editor is nice companion to Microsoft Visual TrueType.
Note: You can't directly open font from %WINDIR%\Fonts from the open file dialog. Copy it somewhere else first.

download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xpitory/files/static-builds/ttfedit.7z/download (400KB)

WebAssembly in Windows XP

While it has been 15 years since I did real Webdev work (php + dhtml mind you), my recently build clang toolchain need some wasm trial. This tutorial https://depth-first.com/articles/2019/10/16/compiling-c-to-webassembly-and-running-it-without-emscripten/ will serve as reference, emscripten itself being mostly python based might be works on XP.

clang download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xpitory/files/clang/ (25MB)

to check what's supported target:

Compiling add.c example (I added -v to see more detail):

As the article explained browser security mostly prevent direct access like that, so lets skip to python webserver:

To test add.html, 360 Chrome Browser 69 is used:

That's it. I think...

WASI runtime is included in the clang package above, but haven't follow up the article to test it. Basically think of wasi sdk like mingw + libgcc + libstdc++, so instead of relying on emscripten prepared libraries you build your own from scratch. Note that since llvm 12 there is llvm own libc, not sure how different is this from wasi-libc.

next time I will demostrate using clang 10 as usable Visual C++ 2019 build tools replacement, all within XP box.

Lightweight PDFium based reader

For a long time the best lightweight PDF reader for XP is SumatraPDF 3.1.2 which based on MuPDF. There is  alternative such poppler/xpdf and ghostscript, all of them use rather unfriendly GPL-like license. PDFium which used within Chromium is new BSD license or APL 2.0 but has crude packaging (typical of google).

I stumbled on https://github.com/vfr/UXReader-Windows a nice pure Win32 API UI library for pdfium, then made little quick change on UXReaderMainWindow.cpp: commenting ChangeWindowMessageFilterEx (which break XP) and add simple argument passing using CommandLineToArgvW so it now will open file from association / cmdline. Note that it's just a barebone demo for the library but IMHO suck less than FoxIt reader. I mean whats the point having a light renderer if you bloat everything else.

Campared to MuPDF I think it's faster (and smaller too), still when rendering image-rich page with multiple overlays and transparency nothing beats Adobe Reader!

opening large ETOPO map

download: UXReader.7z (1.6 MB) require VC++ runtime 2017

Python 2.7 and TLSv1.3

Python 2.7.18 is the last bugfix version of any python that officially support Windows XP. By default those trying to build it on Windows will need openssl 1.0.2 per preconfigured VS2010 project file, that mean TLS 1.2 at best for you. However as we know, the patch to support TLS 1.3 also landing on 2.7.x line all you need is to build hashlib and ssl module with openssl 1.1.1 or preferably 3.0.x header and import libs (so you can update the dll in the future). 

To do so, basically remove libeay and ssleay projects from the solution and remove them from being listed as dependency of _ssl and _hashlib project. 

Put openssl 3.0.x header directory "openssl" into [root]\externals\openssl-1.0.2t\include32 

Rename the import lib of openssl 3.0.x into libeay.lib and ssleay.lib respectively and place them at [root]\PCBuild.

Build haslib and ssl module as usual.

To see if your python has TLS 1.3 you can use ssl.HAS_TLSv1_3 boolean to make sure they are compiled properly, note that with openssl 3.0.x there are a lot of deprecated warnings but no error. Be sure to put libcrypto-3.dll and libssl-3.dll in either DLLs subdirectory and anywhere in %PATH% environment.

my build can be found here https://sourceforge.net/projects/xpitory/files/python/

Since openssl is dynamically loaded it's preferred to be compiled with MSVC 9 (as is python 2.7) though I rarely see issue of mixing msvcrt.

my personal build of openssl 3.0.1 https://sourceforge.net/projects/xpitory/files/shared-builds/openssl-3.0.1-fips-win32.7z/download

32-bit OSes for Virtual PC

After being not bootable for long time, finally ReactOS 0.4.14 is run on Virtual PC 2007 again! This opensource NT5 remake project are closely related to wine and mingw which quite helpful to enhance XP. 

ReactOS 0.4.14

On other hand I'm checking out what's the greatest 32-bit mainstream Linux distro available for Virtual PC, MX Linux 21 (Linux 5.10 LTS) is one of few. This "lightweight" fluxbox variant shown running Firefox 93. Booting took some minutes though.

MX Linux 21

I've kept some historical 32-bit Linux distros iso that compatible with VPC as well:

RHEL 6.10, Oracle Linux 6.10, CentOS 6.10 (Gnome 2, LK 2.6): the last true "LTS" (~10 years) 32-bit Linux, which demonstrate how far kernel 2.6 can be tweaked and enhanced through backport.
Chakra 2012.07 (KDE4, LK 3.4): a rare 32-bit KDE4 SC distro, if not the only one.
Tails 3.11 (Gnome 3, LK 4.8): Privacy oriented distro, a rare Gnome 3 with systemd that able to boot into desktop after a little while.
Xubuntu 18.04.5 (XFCE4, LK5.4): generally regarded as the last 32-bit Ubuntu.