this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
337 points (99.4% liked)
PC Gaming
12770 readers
1896 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Sucks for retro systems. Without the steam client you can't install, for example, Zanzarrah, which is pretty hard to get running on a modern PC, but runs flawlessly on a XP machine. What to do? Download illegal copies?
Steam should maintain at least legacy systems or make the installer available for download.
This is one of the things I really like about using steam with Linux. For some of the old windows games I’ve tried they actually run better under proton than on modern windows. It helps you can easily swap to other compatibility tools like proton GE or Luxtorpeda.
GTA4 (with fusion fix) is a great example of this. Runs like dogshit on my system with Windows 11, runs butter smooth on the same hardware running Fedora 43.
Interesting. My experience differed quite a lot, for example Gabriel Knight 3 was almost impossible to get running, and when it finally worked it was lagging as hell.Gabriel Knight 2 had it's aspect ratios all over the place, it often switched to stretched after a cut scene, I found no fix for it online. The other one I tried was Realms of the Haunting, and it worked great until I reached the tower. From this point on it crashed every few minutes.
Win XP has a 64bit edition, it was just never the default.
That abomination should not have been made.
It's not illegal if you've bought it.
Does it use steamworks drm? You could download it on a new PC and move it over if not.
It probably still works in a VM on under compatibility layers like Linux with Wine/proton/whatever, too.
I feel like this is a good argument for drm-free games and stores like GOG. Not that you as a consumer can always choose that, as many games don’t offer that option, but for the ones that do, there’s less barriers towards playing it in the future or in environments where it’s not originally intended.
There is steamcmd, an official command-line tool— I’ve only used it for game servers, and I don’t know if it includes the Steam runtime/resources, but I know it lets you download games.
You could look at Goldberg Emulator too. I know it’s used often for piracy, but idk about its legality on its own.
Since you mentioned GOG, another relevant thing about them is their game preservation initiatives. Games that get the Good Old Game stamp from them get some engineering effort to be packaged in a runnable way.
I don't know if it is a real solution but can 64-bit be emulated on a 32-bit system?
Probably not with any usable level of performance. It's not just about address width but CPU instruction set, too.
Maybe 32-bit builds of steamcmd will still be available for 32-bit systems? If I had one, I would look in to that.