Raze 1.5.0 released

[Rachael]

Keep in mind this is a volunteer project, it's not meant to "prove" anything nor is any user entitled to anything.

That being said - I'll humor you this once and attempt a mingw build (I doubt it'll work, and if it doesn't I won't even bother fixing it) - but if you know so much about it why don't you just do it yourself?

[blz]

If it was opt-in, then does it not stand to reason that there are many people who just didn't participate? Also, one should consider that not everyone updated, remaining on a previous version and/or updated at a later time when a different version was released that didn't have the survey option? It honestly sounds like the results would be rather unreliable when there is a unknown amount of users who just weren't apart of it.

[wildweasel]

Considering that when this survey was run, the goal was to determine which kinds of legacy support should not be removed, those people were doing themselves a disservice by not opting into the survey. If there were really that many out there, they would have shown up in the stats.

[Rachael]

Sorry to say, I can't get my mingw thing working. And I'm not really going to bother with it anymore now, it's just not worth it.

If you want a 32-bit build of Raze it's something you're going to have to do yourself.

And before you get angry let me remind you: you are not owed anything. Don't let this get out of hand.

You're probably better off sticking with EDuke32 and related projects for whatever games you are trying to run.

[blz]

Sorry to say, I can't get my mingw thing working. And I'm not really going to bother with it anymore now, it's just not worth it.

If you want a 32-bit build of Raze it's something you're going to have to do yourself.

And before you get angry let me remind you: you are not owed anything. Don't let this get out of hand.

You're probably better off sticking with EDuke32 and related projects for whatever games you are trying to run.

FWIW, thank you for trying. I never felt like I was entitled to anything. I just feel like excluding 32-bit in general, based on what I've read in this thread, is leaving out a lot of people, many of which who have probably never compiled anything.

There are various retro-related projects out there that still support older systems, such as:

- RetroArch, which not only supports 32-bit Windows, but also XP and Vista (and even 2000 and 9x)
- ScummVM, which has support for XP (32 and 64 bit) and 9x
- LZDoom is available for 32-bit Windows as well.
- And a ton of standalone emulators.

I use all of the above on my retro machine, most of which are recent versions.

So while I would never feel entitled, I do wonder why Zdoom has become the hold out when most of the retro realm views XP and 32-bit as being worthy of support for retro reasons, and I often see it cited that newer Windows versions aren't as suited for an all-in-one retro set-up which I can cooperate from experience trying to use 7 and 10. XP just has a much smaller memory footprint and light on the CPU (my all-in-one retro machine is a P4 2.4ghz which has been a real good balance) by far compared to later versions.

[Graf Zahl]

If it was opt-in, then does it not stand to reason that there are many people who just didn't participate?

It also stands to reason that the non-participants even themselves out across the existing hardware. This anonymous large group of users with antiquated hardware is just a fairy tale.

[Graf Zahl]

Regarding MinGW, no, sorry. Nobody's gonna do this and maintain the version, Nobody here uses Windows XP, plus some of the dependencies won't work anymore with it at all, so it's pointless anyway.

It cannot be stressed enough that neither 32 bit nor XP support come for free. XP in particular requires major compromises nobody is willing to take anymore - and the few who do are unlikely to test their program on XP anyway

[blz]

If it was opt-in, then does it not stand to reason that there are many people who just didn't participate?

It also stands to reason that the non-participants even themselves out across the existing hardware. This anonymous large group of users with antiquated hardware is just a fairy tale.

Is it not fair to say that a dedicated retro machine with an OS like XP is going to be without Internet access, as has long been recommended? If this is the case, even if one did opt-in on those set-ups, there would be no route to send the information to any on-line server, therefore skewing the results taken from the survey. It really feels like this has not been considered.

[blz]

Regarding MinGW, no, sorry. Nobody's gonna do this and maintain the version, Nobody here uses Windows XP, plus some of the dependencies won't work anymore with it at all, so it's pointless anyway.

It cannot be stressed enough that neither 32 bit nor XP support come for free. XP in particular requires major compromises nobody is willing to take anymore - and the few who do are unlikely to test their program on XP anyway

I understand, I only mentioned MinGW because the compilation page specifically mentions it, and I got there by following from the Raze Github information.

[Chris]

Mingw can still be used on XP (I've built many things directly on XP before, and I will be attempting with Raze when I get the chance.)

Newer versions of msys2/mingw don't support XP anymore either.

developers of winpthread and other runtime libraries bumped the minimum supported OS version to Windows 7 time ago because they want to take advantage of new APIs. This is not going to change.

winpthread is necessary for MinGW's libstdc++ threading support, and newer Windows kernels have features to improve threading and atomic operations that they apparently want to make use of.

[Graf Zahl]

XP does not have support for several synchronization objects that are required for the C++ standard library's threading features, and some of the dependencies simply need this stuff, so they cannot be compiled for XP anymore. And this will only get worse in the future because XP is no longer a relevant platform. These days one has to go out of their way to get XP support properly working and that's simply not an option anymore for lots of software. I also removed all the crutches in GZDoom to get support for more recent features on Vista+ only and made those hard requirements because it's a lot easier to maintain this way.

But seriously, browsing the linked stuff from that Github report you linked is really disturbing. Why do so many people still consider XP support mandatory that they are either willing to jump through these countless hoops or demand from others to jump through them...?

[Graf Zahl]

Is it not fair to say that a dedicated retro machine with an OS like XP is going to be without Internet access, as has long been recommended? If this is the case, even if one did opt-in on those set-ups, there would be no route to send the information to any on-line server, therefore skewing the results taken from the survey. It really feels like this has not been considered.

And how many people, do you think, have such machines? 10% of our user base, or maybe 1% or maybe 0.1%. I rather estimate this on the lower end of the spectrum.
And sorry to be blunt: It's of no concern to me. Neither GZDoom nor Raze are made for retro machines. They are developed and tested on modern Windows 10/11 systems with current graphics cards and explicitly target the same class of systems as their main target. Realistically this means that 10 year old computers are to be considered the cutoff point. Well, actually with current system requirements it's closer to 12-13 years if you leave out some cheap-ass craptops from that era but the point still stands.

Retro machines are meant for running old software of the era the machine was made on which does not interoperate well anymore with current hardware and OSs. But modern Doom/Build source ports have kept up with the times and run well on modern computers - they do not need a retro machine and are not primarily made for one, even if some still work. Actually, as I already pointed out a few times, keeping up retro support does not come for free. It requires time and effort and sometimes compromises support for modern systems in some way.

[Gez]

I understand, I only mentioned MinGW because the compilation page specifically mentions it

This is the page for compiling ZDoom, whose development ceased in 2016. It's not relevant for compiling recent versions of GZDoom or Raze.

I suppose the GitHub should instead direct to the page for compiling GZDoom. Unfortunately, those pages are not well maintained and full of outdated info.

[Rachael]

For an older system I would definitely recommend against Windows XP - and use Linux with Wine+DosBox+RetroArch+various ports instead.

Unless your system is from the 90's or early 00's its processor will also almost certainly have 64-bit capability - and all the projects you linked (and more) will work.

And as a bonus, you can style and theme Linux to look and sound exactly like Windows XP did.

It's a bit of an inconvenience to set it up and get it all working, but in the end it's a much bigger win for you - Linux has far more compatibility and usability than Windows XP does (though nowhere near what a modern version of Windows has) - and you get an operating system that you don't have to completely isolate from your network or the internet for security concerns because Linux does not do much compatibility breaking between kernel versions.

[KynikossDragonn]

For an older system I would definitely recommend against Windows XP - and use Linux with Wine+DosBox+RetroArch+various ports instead.

It's a bit of an inconvenience to set it up and get it all working, but in the end it's a much bigger win for you - Linux has far more compatibility and usability than Windows XP

Slight problem with this is that depending on the hardware involved, you might not have as great as performance on Linux than legacy Windows. Xorg removed a lot of unmaintained drivers, as did the Mesa project. NVIDIA being as utterly proprietary as they are, I'm not even sure what you'd do for XP era GeForce cards under Linux these days. Older Radeon cards can be very, very buggy to use under Mesa vs using them with "fglrx" which AMD/ATI completely abandoned for "AMDGPU-PRO". (I can't even use GZDoom on a Radeon HD 6870 under Mesa for example, I just get a black screen and a insane amount of errors spammed in the terminal)

Getting proper acceleration for Xorg with old hardware is a complete crapshoot, and not having that proper acceleration will make absolutely everything abysmal to use properly unless you use a overly simplistic window manager. Having to track down and compile old X server versions and their respective drivers for old hardware would definitely be quite a adventure.