Building Principia for Windows XP

a month ago

Principia was originally released in 2014 and supported Windows XP, but modern toolchains and dependencies like UCRT have since made this compatibility difficult to guarantee.
The project aims to bring Principia back to Windows XP using an open-source build, leveraging SDL for cross-platform support and requiring minimal code changes.
A custom toolchain was built using GCC, binutils, and mingw-w64, targeting i686-w64-mingw32 with MSVCRT and WIN32_WINNT set to 0x0501 for Windows XP compatibility.
Dependencies like curl, Freetype, libjpeg-turbo, libpng, SDL, and zlib were built with the new toolchain, though GTK3 was replaced with Dear Imgui for dialogs to avoid complexity.
Building Principia required addressing a compiler error related to __stdcall calling conventions by updating typedefs in pipeline.c to use GLAD function prototypes.
Testing on a Windows XP virtual machine and real hardware (an old desktop with AMD Phenom II) confirmed the binary runs, despite font corruption issues likely due to OpenGL drivers.
Post-build improvements included switching curl to use mbedTLS for TLS support on XP and creating an NSIS installer for ease of use, with scripts available on GitHub.

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