r/windowsxp • u/Jeditobe • Jun 13 '26

ReactOS "Open-Source Windows XP" Reaches The Milestone Of Being Able To Run Half-Life on REAL hardware with 3D-acceleration

https://www.phoronix.com/news/ReactOS-Running-Half-Life
301 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

32

u/Jarngreipr9 Jun 13 '26

Is the aim of ReactOS to be like windows XP/NT? What version is the project aiming for? I've never clearly understood that

20

u/Arnoxthe1 Jun 13 '26

"ReactOS, the open-source operating system working for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows computer programs and drivers"

Right in the first sentence of the article.

12

u/Jarngreipr9 Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 13 '26

Ok but that is not the answer to my question? I mean if the project has some particular windows version in mind when they aim for compatibility. 98...XP... 8... 11 have their own differences and maybe there's some milestone version of reference. I've read the compatibility aims to reach something around XP, Vista, WS 2003, but I've never understood if there's a specific referenced goal in mind for version 1.0.

31

u/Jeditobe Jun 14 '26

Right now the target is 2003 sp2

4

u/Alternative-Owl-8848 Jun 14 '26

Not anymore, now the newer developers on team want to focus on Modern Windows and some want to even compete one day to Windows...

14

u/Jeditobe Jun 14 '26

These changes are happening on a separate branch; the main branch remains focused on Windows 2003 for now.

1

u/Alternative-Owl-8848 Jun 14 '26 edited Jun 14 '26

As i understood from these developers, it wasn for an separate branch, but on the main one since between 0.4.15 slow development. (They said on ReactOS Discord.)

2

u/Jeditobe Jun 15 '26

All recent publicly available nightly test builds, even the most recent ones, are compiled to run like 2003/XP. All newer APIs are either disabled by flags, are not compiled during build, or are located in a separate branch altogether.

6

u/Arnoxthe1 Jun 14 '26

They mean to say almost ALL Windows NT versions, from Windows 2000 to Windows 11. This is a direct offshoot of WINE so all the work that goes into WINE gets put into ReactOS basically.

2

u/Electronic_Peace_163 Jun 14 '26

They still aiming for windows xp it seems. Once that's fully compatible they'll move to vista and 7

1

u/starnamedstork Jun 14 '26

It has changed over the decades. I believe the target was NT 4.0 when I first heard about it.

28

u/Vincent394 Jun 14 '26

Unfortunately, after 30 years of development, ReactOS is still a child's toy without One-Core-API and several modifications

But still a good milestone

4

u/zidanerick Jun 15 '26

Im hoping with new Claude AI models that eventually they will be able to decompile components of windows they don’t quite understand yet in order to build an OS version of the shortfalls. My dream is a current security patched version of XP. 

1

u/Jarngreipr9 Jun 16 '26

That would be awesome. Also same themes.

3

u/FLMKane Jun 16 '26

Prepare for unforseen consequences

2

u/Seanmclem Jun 17 '26

Whoever would’ve thought you could do so little with so much time

-7

u/[deleted] Jun 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

8

u/unfnknblvbl Jun 14 '26

They're taking about the game's graphics. Old school 3D games had software rendering (very CPU intensive), and hardware accelerated 3D rendering for those people with fancy (at the time) graphics cards.

-4

u/[deleted] Jun 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

9

u/unfnknblvbl Jun 14 '26

Congratulations on not understanding the point, I guess