pcsx2_XP
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blueclouds8666
Welcome to PCSX2 XP!
After long months working behind the scenes, i can finally announce to the internet this new fork:
PCSX2 XP is a project intended to recover Windows XP support for the latest versions of this emulator. The original developers decided to remove support for said operating system in March 2016, and the latest version available for XP, v1.4.0, was from January 2016. After a long development, the PCSX2 team announced a new stable version, the v1.6.0, and i discovered the xp support was removed to not come back. Far from doing nothing about it, i started researching the code and to consider the options i had to make this possible.
What i did is, modify first the older versions to make them work, and keep advancing to newer and newer versions until i reached the May 2020 version. Wasn't an easy task at all, as there was four years of development beween the two stable versions. However, with enough patience, i worked on the code between May and September, with the following overall results:
- I first found one big wall that made me consider cancelling this project. The project was migrated to VS2015 at around 2017, and the spu2-x, the audio plugin, didn't want to work at all under XP when compiled with post-2013 versions of Visual Studio. It was already a known problem (https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/1195) and i didn't know how to fix it. Despite that, i realized that keeping the VS2013 compatibility wasn't THAT hard, but i had to keep another eye under the code to avoid it breaking the compiling process.
- by 12th September, i reached the 23th Sep 2018 v1.5.0-dev version, and decided to make this one public as subsequent versions removed the DX9 renderer. A total of 21 commit reverts were done to make it XP and VS2013 compatible.
- for post-2018 versions, i had to divide the project in two parts: the GSDX plugin, and the rest of the components. By that time, the project was getting too big to keep working with it sustainably. Both sides were joined back by fall of September.
- finally, by 18th September, i reached the final v1.6.0 version. I had to do a lot of testing and tweaking to lower the number of commit reverts to 23 and keep the code as clear as possible. The DirectX side of GSDX had to go, as DirectX 9 was already gone from the code and Windows XP isn't (yet) compatible with DirectX 10/11 or later.
Although far from perfect, i'm proud to announce these results, and i hope XP users find this useful. If you happen to find a bug or problem related to this project, let us know with a new issue thread.
If you are interested in Win XP/7 stuff and workarounds, take also a look at my website where i post my other projects: http://neonfloppy.sytes.net
You can also find some of my thoughts about this project as well as a mirror for the code in here: http://neonfloppy.sytes.net/projects/pcsx2-xp/
''Windows XP isn't (yet) compatible with DirectX 10/11 or later''
there are some patches over the internet (made by russians ?) that can be installed on XP and when you check the dxdiag menu, the DX11 or DX12 seems to be installed.
It was already a known problem (PCSX2#1195) and i didn't know how to fix it.
I literally mentioned the fix there in the first post. And it's not even needed anymore with VS2017.
