Windows XP or 7 for Steam/Doujins?

[Bonus!]

Due to the release of Crimzon Clover, I created a Steam account, and will change my PC to a dual boot configuration. I haven't used Windows for years, but I know that Vista was a complete disaster. I was thus wondering which Windows version would be the 'better' one for Doujins or Steam games --- I've got no interest in 'AAA' blockbuster games like Call of Duty and the like.

Thanks!

[ZacharyB]

It might depend on which doujin software you're interested in playing. Seeing as to how most doujin shmup software is older, Windows XP might be more compatible with those games. If you've got your eye on the future, then go for the later Windows release.

I think Windows XP, while now unsupported by Microsoft, is still relevant and can play many things.

[Ed Oscuro]

Win 8.1 most likely. Faster than 7 still.

Me, I'm holding out for 9.

XP is definitely a decent bet for doujins though.

[Bonus!]

Thanks for the responses! My top priority is playing Crimzon Clover, Astebreed and Ikaruga (all Steam), in addition to older doujins like Blue Wish Resurrection and maybe some Touhous. They didn't work so well in Wine in Linux and OSX, so I've got some catching up to do.

I think I'll install Windows XP first, and stick with that until there is a compelling reason to update.

[ZellSF]

There's some missing information here. Are you planning to use this dualboot Windows setup for anything other than playing old games?

I would never install a outdated OS (meaning anything older than 8.1) on a computer I intended to use as a desktop computer. Not only for security reasons, but because of the many features that has been added with each Windows revision.

I would also be careful about going as old as XP even for playing low end games released today. Game developers will be gradually dropping support for it regardless of if they're AAA blockbusters or not.

XP's compatibility advantage is overstated. While it's entirely possible you'll find one that doesn't, 99% of games work as well in Vista/7/8 as they did in XP. With WINE as a fallback in a dualboot environment, I doubt you'll have any compatibility worries at all going with a newer OS.

[Bonus!]

There's some missing information here. Are you planning to use this dualboot Windows setup for anything other than playing old games?

Oh, sorry if it wasn't clear. My intention is to use Windows exclusively for Doujins/Steam.

I would never install a outdated OS (meaning anything older than 8.1) on a computer I intended to use as a desktop computer. Not only for security reasons, but because of the many features that has been added with each Windows revision.

What features would that be? As a Linux user with 10+ years of experience, I consider Windows as a bloated mess, with virtually the only reason for its existence being inertia in big companies, and games, for the private end user.

There is one aspect that I found a bit odd about Windows 8: if you go to the Steam page for Ikaruga, it lists as minimum requirements "Windows 8 / 7 / Vista / XP", however, under recommended setup, only Windows 7 is mentioned. I've done some more reading and it seems that there were some issues with Win8 when it came out, but which have been rectified.

I would also be careful about going as old as XP even for playing low end games released today. Game developers will be gradually dropping support for it regardless of if they're AAA blockbusters or not.

That's a good point.

[ZellSF]

What features would that be?

See, that's very tricky for two reasons:

1: Features that I like might be entirely pointless to you
2: There might be a third party application that provides the features in earlier OSes if you're OK with potentially hacky and/or unstable solutions.

New features in Vista that I find important

• Desktop composition (with vsync)
• Combined favorite/folder tree pane in the file manager
• Mouse based address bar in the file manager
• Per user default applications
• Task manager can show commandline of applications
• Startup program manager can sort programs
• Device manager is easily accessible
• All windows have a taskbar button and are in the alt-tab window list
• Much better 64-bit support

New features in Windows 7 I find important

• Launchers on taskbar disappears when you the applications
• Much better encryption support (for system drive and external drives)

New features in Windows 8 I find important:

• File transfers show a progress bar, you can pause them and you can tell them never to bother you about merge conflicts
• Task manager shows how much processes are accessing your storage

That's of course just stuff I find important, not going into hardware stuff like getting SATA, TRIM and USB3 to play nicely or features I don't really care about like advanced firewall rules, easy overview over how your memory is used, built-in support for burning and mounting disc images, performance improvements aimed at rotational HDDs, better multimonitor support, better search indexing and general security improvements. Also not going into all the constant little annoyances I can't list off-hand, but constantly run into whenever I have to deal with a XP computer.

There is one aspect that I found a bit odd about Windows 8: if you go to the Steam page for Ikaruga, it lists as minimum requirements "Windows 8 / 7 / Vista / XP", however, under recommended setup, only Windows 7 is mentioned. I've done some more reading and it seems that there were some issues with Win8 when it came out, but which have been rectified.

Ikaruga ran fine at launch on Windows 8.

[Bonus!]

Thanks for taking the time to list those improvements!

New features in Windows 8 I find important:
File transfers show a progress bar, you can pause them and you can tell them never to bother you about merge conflicts
Task manager shows how much processes are accessing your storage

Those were among the things I found rather annoying with Windows in the past. I'm glad it's fixed now.

You've made a very good argument in favor of Windows 8.1, so I'll install that version.

[Ed Oscuro]

Vista's desktop composition is awful for games (and power usage / use of your hardware); I always turn it off. That said, the vsync addition could be nice for daily use (personally I prefer a snappy desktop so I still avoid this).

Windows 7 is notably faster than Vista in every regard - UAC prompts aren't so intrusive, booting is much faster, and the system isn't so resource-hungry.
As far as usability improvements, from Vista on the file replacement dialog is much more informative and useful.

Windows 8 and up reportedly have further improvements in this area.

Yes, XP is already too little to use for old games. If I were playing games from before 2002 or so exclusively, XP wouldn't be a bad choice (it still has some 16-bit application support, which is gone from Vista and newer). But support from new hardware, and new games, for XP is slim to none. Most importantly, XP doesn't have DirectX 10 or newer, which really limits what you can install on it.

And yes, the security aspects are a given. Installing Steam on an XP box seems like a bad idea, even if you're only intending to take Steam online. Who knows what vulnerabilities will be facing the world?

[ZellSF]

Vista's desktop composition is awful for games (and power usage / use of your hardware); I always turn it off. That said, the vsync addition could be nice for daily use (personally I prefer a snappy desktop so I still avoid this).

Desktop composition automatically turns itself off when you're running fullscreen games (it does in Windows 7 anyway). If your computer is capable of running Ikaruga, desktop composition should not have a noticeable effect on performance or power draw.

it still has some 16-bit application support, which is gone from Vista and newer

Not true. All 32-bit versions of Windows (up to and including 8.1) supports 16-bit applications. It's the 64-bit versions of Windows that don't.

64-bit Windows being a requirement if you want to use more than 3.5 GB of memory. So there's your choice: 16-bit applications without having to resort to a virtual machine or more memory.

[Despatche]

the issue is much simpler than all that. there are a lot of bizarre incompatibilities in nt6 for certain early xp-era games, but a lot of doujin developers have 7 or 8 now and will use it moving forward. it is highly recommended that you have both.

I haven't used Windows for years, but I know that Vista was a complete disaster.

it's all public perception, really. what happened is that all the third-party devs refused to realize that it was anything more than vaporware until sometime after it had actually been released. by the time the service pack went out, everything had been solved; 7 is pretty much vista sp1 plus a few silly features.

whenever people talk about vista, they always always always always talk about old pre-sp1 vista and the situation around it. if you had vista since 7 was released, there wasn't and isn't much point in dealing with 7 at all; you're better off going with 8 and telling developers to stop obsessing over 7 already. supposedly "everyone" "hates" 8, so this won't happen when 9 comes out, but people are so damned random.

[trap15]

The thing that made Vista "suck" was that MS threw out pretty much the entire driver stack (and a lot of other software stacks), causing there to be very poor hardware support for quite a while. This was all for the best though, the old systems that were thrown out were very crusty and needed replacing. Having one "bomb" OS in order to patch things up wasn't the worst idea, in retrospect.

[ZellSF]

I didn't really bother going into why Vista was actually pretty good and is hated today for entirely misguided reasons because it really doesn't matter. There's no reason to choose Vista over Windows 7.

(If anyone's wondering: I don't think there's any reason to choose 7 over 8.1 either)

[trap15]

Yeah, 7 is better than Vista in every way, as far as I can tell.

A reason to prefer 7 over 8.1 though would be the user experience. May seem silly, but UX is a huge huge thing, especially when deciding on an operating system, at least for me.

[Despatche]

last i checked, base 8 has more substantial improvements over final 7 than base 7 does over vista, and then you have 8.1 on top of that.

I didn't really bother going into why Vista was actually pretty good and is hated today for entirely misguided reasons because it really doesn't matter. There's no reason to choose Vista over Windows 7.

it kinda does matter. people never shut up about why vista "was bad", so it's clearly relevant and clearly needs to be challenged. forget about the eventual brush off, because that part is what really doesn't matter.

that stupid windows cycle does need to be challenged, at least. me wasn't even supposed to exist, and is only as much of a separate os as 98se is. the cycle isn't even so on-off because of that, and because of things like 3.1 and xp and 7/8 and so on. long story short, there is no cycle, because there's no pattern.

[Ed Oscuro]

Agreed with trap15 about the UX - that's been the sticking point for me and why I'm just going to roll on with my still-pretty-new Windows 7 until 9 arrives.

Vista's desktop composition is awful for games (and power usage / use of your hardware); I always turn it off. That said, the vsync addition could be nice for daily use (personally I prefer a snappy desktop so I still avoid this).

Desktop composition automatically turns itself off when you're running fullscreen games (it does in Windows 7 anyway). If your computer is capable of running Ikaruga, desktop composition should not have a noticeable effect on performance or power draw.

Not all doujins run fullscreen, though, and I've heard of driver spottiness in invoking 3D performance modes (not necessarily disabling desktop compositing, but in allowing the video card to draw power beyond a low "desktop" threshhold). Not a big deal to spot and fix if you want to use desktop composition, though.

I keep getting the short end of the stick with 16-bit support details - but I think that in this day and age, Windows 7 is the point where 64-bit finally became the standard. Not many people use the 32-bit version, and like Despatche and trap15 says, there's little changes here and there that make life interesting for 16-bit program users.

people never shut up about why vista "was bad"

They haven't been raising many objections to it in this thread, so it's off-topic. At best it's only of interest to serious computer historian people and maybe people with a stack of unused Vista discs they'd like to flog (like me).

[Despatche]

but that was a general statement, reflecting on the fact that "it's over now"; there's no need to choose vista over 7 or anything like that. but it's not over; it's going to be of interest to the ridiculously large amount of people who only know that "vista is bad".

[Ed Oscuro]

If you want to enlighten them, maybe you'd better find a more relevant venue so we can keep this thread on-topic.

[Drum]

Fighting battles that don't matter seems like a great way to spend a life that doesn't matter.

[SuperDeadite]

As someone who went through this just recently, here's some things to know. As someone who still doesn't own a smartphone, 8 just looked awful to me. So I went with 7 64-bit.

In general things are fine. But 7 has a few issues you should be aware of, mostly in regards to Sound support. Starting with VISTA, CD-Audio went to shit. A lot of doujins liked to use redbook audio for music, a lot of such games (even big name games like Quake II) will have issues with the CD audio under Vista and later. Normally in such games the CD music will loop at the end of the track, in Vista and after, it will just end. There is a Japanese made program that allows you to turn the audio files into mp3s or whatever and patch the game to use those files instead. Annoying to setup, but it does work. If you want the games to run fully as intended, XP is the way to go here. You also cant adjust CD audio level anymore in Vista, and a lot of these doujins don't have direct volume control. So if you don't like the default CD/SFX mix you get in Vista and after, too fucking bad. (Again can be fixed by using the above program and manually editing the music track volumes, a real pain in the ass)

Getting my MIDI devices and software to work in 7 was also a pain in the ass, as Windows does not allow you to change the default MIDI device anymore. There is a control panel program made by a German dude that will fix this, no idea if it works in 8 though...

Another thing to consider is do you need a Gameport? If so XP was the last Windows to truly support it. There is a hack that will work in 7 32-bit. But in 64-bit, you are shit out of luck.

[cools]

Yeah, 7 is better than Vista in every way, as far as I can tell.

A reason to prefer 7 over 8.1 though would be the user experience. May seem silly, but UX is a huge huge thing, especially when deciding on an operating system, at least for me.

I went back to 7 after an extended period with 8 and 8.1.

I do miss the additional bits and bobs already mentioned that 8 provided, and I could stomach the Metro start screen, but getting under the hood in 8 is such an utter pain to do (along with the even more splintered control panels) I got sick of it. Having to reboot twice to get out of all the protected mode (with no way of permanently disabling the protection) was tiresome the first time, nevermind the umpteenth.

[ZellSF]

Agreed with trap15 about the UX - that's been the sticking point for me and why I'm just going to roll on with my still-pretty-new Windows 7 until 9 arrives.

Vista's desktop composition is awful for games (and power usage / use of your hardware); I always turn it off. That said, the vsync addition could be nice for daily use (personally I prefer a snappy desktop so I still avoid this).

Desktop composition automatically turns itself off when you're running fullscreen games (it does in Windows 7 anyway). If your computer is capable of running Ikaruga, desktop composition should not have a noticeable effect on performance or power draw.

Not all doujins run fullscreen, though

There's also compatibility options to turn desktop composition off whenever you're running specific programs. In Windows 8 the specific option is gone but I believe Windows 95 compatibility mode still turns it off. I have never seen the need though.

In general things are fine. But 7 has a few issues you should be aware of, mostly in regards to Sound support. Starting with VISTA, CD-Audio went to shit. A lot of doujins liked to use redbook audio for music, a lot of such games (even big name games like Quake II) will have issues with the CD audio under Vista and later. Normally in such games the CD music will loop at the end of the track, in Vista and after, it will just end. There is a Japanese made program that allows you to turn the audio files into mp3s or whatever and patch the game to use those files instead. Annoying to setup, but it does work. If you want the games to run fully as intended, XP is the way to go here. You also cant adjust CD audio level anymore in Vista, and a lot of these doujins don't have direct volume control. So if you don't like the default CD/SFX mix you get in Vista and after, too fucking bad. (Again can be fixed by using the above program and manually editing the music track volumes, a real pain in the ass)

While Vista made it worse, WinMM compatibility went to shit already in XP. There's a workaround that works for like 99% of cases though, like you already mentioned so I'm not sure why it's a problem.

Lack of CDDA volume adjustments might be (for some software without good volume settings), it can be worked around but as you said it's messy.

For reference I think he's talking about _inmm.dll. There's also the CDDA wrapper GoG uses which you can use for non-GoG games, but I've found it to be really buggy (even with the games it's distributed with!).

I like using these workarounds with the games it works with anyway, since then I can no-cd crack the games and still have working CD audio. Don't see how this is not running the games fully as intended.

I do miss the additional bits and bobs already mentioned that 8 provided, and I could stomach the Metro start screen, but getting under the hood in 8 is such an utter pain to do (along with the even more splintered control panels) I got sick of it. Having to reboot twice to get out of all the protected mode (with no way of permanently disabling the protection) was tiresome the first time, nevermind the umpteenth.

Control panel looks exactly the same to me. As for protected mode I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what you're talking about and I have no idea why you assume anyone would. If I search for protected mode and Windows 8 all I get are results about a feature in Internet Explorer that's easy to disable.

Same really goes for the people who mentioned UX, since it's a terribly vague word. If you're talking about Metro a lot of people hated it and there's a lot of ways to get rid of it entirely. I've used Classic Shell since I switched to Windows 7 so when I upgraded to Windows 8 there was no difference. I never see Metro. I know I advocated against hacks, but really all the Classic Start Menu has to do is intercept two keys. I've used it since Windows 7 and it crashed a total of one time (and it didn't take Explorer with it).

If you hate any UI changes 7+ Taskbar Tweaker allows you to customize taskbar behavior and make it Win95 style if you want to. I think that potentially can crash Explorer though, but I've never seen it happen.

If you're talking about the visual style, I will take simple colors and flat shading over the ugly transparencies of Vista/7 any day. I'm pretty sensitive to tearing so I can't even tolerate the Windows Classic theme (which is not compatible with desktop composition).

[Despatche]

If you want to enlighten them, maybe you'd better find a more relevant venue so we can keep this thread on-topic.

you're ed oscuro... why are you suddenly so worried about the topic? the problem with "going off-topic" are the people who freak out about doing so.

Fighting battles that don't matter seems like a great way to spend a life that doesn't matter.

and you're drum... i think you know a lot more about that than i do. something matters when a lot of people care about it, and no amount of half-hearted deflecting is going to change that.

A lot of doujins liked to use redbook audio for music, a lot of such games (even big name games like Quake II) will have issues with the CD audio under Vista and later.

can i get a shortlist on this? i've only found a few... twinkle soft's games, old versions of kamui, etc. i figure it's going to be concentrated in late-'90s and early-'00s games, and many of those are hard to find...

[Warp_Rattler]

If you're wanting to run Steam, you shouldn't even be THINKING about Windows XP. Steam means Internet access, and running something that no longer receives security updates is the OS version of being that guy who takes pride in still using IE 6. The audio shenanigans might be the only reason to keep with an older version of Windows, but if that's a deal-breaker for you then you're probably not running a Steam title or a recent doujin, and you might be better off running a version of Windows that has the number '9' in the title on appropriate late 1990s-era hardware. There's no reason XP should at all be under consideration for a fresh install on an online PC where you want to run modern games.

Since you're not immediately coming from Windows, the question of which to use is streamlined somewhat because you're not going to be hung up on whatever minor changes to the UI and usability were included with the latest version. If you already had a copy of Vista I'd say you might be okay after whipping it into shape with SP1 (I certainly did not find it that bad, at that point and after tweaking it to my liking; its biggest sin was not arriving that way on release), but if not you might as well just get 7 instead. There's nothing that Vista had that 7 doesn't, and 7 is much more future-proof.

I'm running Windows 8.1 on my laptop right now and can highly recommend it, with a few caveats. First, it is even more resource-efficient than 7 was, and 7 was pretty damn impressive following even a trimmed-down Vista install. Sure, the alternating Metro UI is pretty schizophrenic, and you'll either hate it, or find a way to ignore it. It stays out of your way most of the time in 8.1, and it really doesn't ruin my day when I have to open the sidebar to select a wireless network or whatever. A lot of people really hate the Apps screen; I'm a fan of keyboard launchers so I like being able to hit the Windows key and then just type a few letters of the program I want to run and hit Enter. Then again, I just use Launchy anyways, and so the howls of "But the Start Menu!!!" were pretty irrelevant to my experience because I hated the damn thing since forever.

But UI stuff is subjective and the only person who knows how that'll work for you is you. The reason to be wary of 8.1 is that like all versions of Windows, program and driver support aren't quite there yet (everyone that bitches about Vista seems to conveniently have forgotten the goddamned horror wasteland that was the first two or three years of XP's life), and this may or may not affect you depending on your use case. The fucking geniuses at Synaptics made an 8.1 touchpad driver for my computer that I couldn't install out of the box because their most valuable employee forgot to properly sign the installer for 8.1, so it defaults to the slightly less feature-filled 7 x64 version instead (there is an annoying workaround that involves temporarily disabling Windows' driver checking and then NEVER EVER let Windows try to "update" the driver). The copy of Jedi Knight I bought on Steam didn't work at first because of some nonsense with some of the DirectX calls no longer being supported in modern versions of the framework; some tweaking got it to run but in glorious 8-bit color which isn't too migraine-inducing if you do it for less than an hour at a time. And as detailed in the appropriate thread, Akashicverse (or at least the trial version) does not play well with Windows 8, but when I decided to buy the retail version blind I could then use the Windows 8 executable that came in the latest update.

So I dunno, I'm pretty happy with 8.1 but I acknowledge that it might take a little more effort at times than just download 'n play. 7 may be your safest bet in that case. Maybe just double-check which OS version runs all or most of the games you want to play and go with that one. And if you want to play Jedi Knight, then dust off an old Pentium III and put XP on that--as long as you keep it off the Internet.

[cools]

Control panel looks exactly the same to me. As for protected mode I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what you're talking about and I have no idea why you assume anyone would. If I search for protected mode and Windows 8 all I get are results about a feature in Internet Explorer that's easy to disable.

Regular Control Panel and Metro "Settings" are separate but work together. Extremely difficult to use.

As for protected mode I'm using the wrong jargon. I've checked and it's this nonsense for disabling driver signature and debugging modes: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... -safe-mode

You *cannot* permanently disable driver signing. If you're doing anything regarding unusual drivers it's a nightmare.

8 and 8.1 make me feel like I'm fighting the OS to do anything mildly out of the ordinary (Vista was the same), 7 (and XP/2000/NT all the way back) does not.

[ZellSF]

Control panel looks exactly the same to me. As for protected mode I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what you're talking about and I have no idea why you assume anyone would. If I search for protected mode and Windows 8 all I get are results about a feature in Internet Explorer that's easy to disable.

Regular Control Panel and Metro "Settings" are separate but work together. Extremely difficult to use.

Metro control panel for Metro settings and shortcuts to some common other options. Control Panel for everything else. I use Windows 8 without Metro and I've never touched the Metro settings application.

You *cannot* permanently disable driver signing. If you're doing anything regarding unusual drivers it's a nightmare.

Enforced driver signature checks is again a 32-bit vs 64-bit issue, not one with newer versions. Though I don't doubt Windows 8 makes running unsigned drivers much harder again.

Changes in software compatibility between Windows versions is overstated. Changes in hardware compatibility is not.

8 and 8.1 make me feel like I'm fighting the OS to do anything mildly out of the ordinary (Vista was the same), 7 (and XP/2000/NT all the way back) does not.

You lost me entirely here. Vista is the same as 7. 7 is basically a glorified service pack for Vista.

[Despatche]

Steam means Internet access, and running something that no longer receives security updates is the OS version of being that guy who takes pride in still using IE 6.

can we please stop saying this too? it's not true, at all! it won't be for years.

[ZellSF]

Steam means Internet access, and running something that no longer receives security updates is the OS version of being that guy who takes pride in still using IE 6.

can we please stop saying this too? it's not true, at all! it won't be for years.

It could take years, but it could also take days. All it takes is one exploit to be found and with Microsoft no longer providing patches, the motivation is pretty high. I would be very surprised if it takes many years before some severe weaknesses are found.

[Bonus!]

I installed Windows 8.1 today. I have to say that this is an absolutely horrible OS. The UI is dumbed down and awkward to use (touchscreen feel with a mouse!?), and makes it difficult to get to the important things (system settings, explorer, etc). Both OSX and Linux (!) offer a much better experience. To my great dismay, there is no driver available for the 64 bit version of Windows for my USB Wifi antenna, and that one was recognized on Linux instantly. Thankfully I don't have to any kind of serious work in Windows. As a launcher for doujins or Steam it's tolerable, I guess, but I hope that Valve succeeds with their push towards Linux, and that the games I play will be ported too.

Oh, I also had to install a fix so that I could play Blue Wish Resurrection Plus at 60 fps (there is a thread on the forum). The game just looked odd at 30 fps, was extremely slow and not smooth at all. Amusingly enough, quite a few people on Youtube have posted videos of this and other games with the FPS counter at 30 fps, not realizing that they are not playing the game as it was intended.

[Ed Oscuro]

Steam OS should be good and capable.

Hopefully Windows 8 will get another free patch in the form of a version 8.2. After that it's Windows 9 and possibly a more cloudified version of the OS, another move which I am anticipating with the same eagerness of preparing to eat a bag of rocks. One just hopes they're the smallest pebbles possible.