SSE Required?

[myulz]

Hello! My first post here, apologies for a very n00b type question, I did a search already, couldn't see this asked already.

I play the regular C&C and RA on my Pentium II (twin 450mhz chips, 1gb ram, GT610 graphics) running on XP. I also play OpenRA on my modern Core I7. I wondered if openRA would run on the Pentium II, as there is a 32 bit package available. It downloads fine but throws an error "This is not a valid Win32 application" and I wondered maybe if it had been compiled to use SSE extensions, which the Pentium II does not have.

I appreciate I'm most likely out of luck here but I'm curious as to where the issue lies and whether anyone with knowledge on this would know?

Thanks so much everyone

Myulz

[Maybellerant]

Hi Myulz, great question, and not a n00b one at all! You’re actually hitting a very real technical limitation that comes down to CPU instruction set support and modern compiler targets.
Edit by: "Drift Boss" last 1 day ago!

[firelifetime]

Hello! My first post here, apologies for a very n00b type question, I did a search already, couldn't see this asked already.

I play the regular C&C and RA on my Pentium II (twin 450mhz chips, 1gb ram, GT610 graphics) running on XP. I also play OpenRA on my modern Core I7. I wondered if openRA would run on the Pentium II, as there is a 32 bit package available. It downloads fine but throws an error "This is not a valid Win32 application" and I wondered maybe if it had been compiled to use SSE extensions, which the Pentium II does not have.

I appreciate I'm most likely out of luck here but I'm curious as to where the issue lies and whether anyone with knowledge on this would know?

Thanks so much everyone
@Geometry Dash

Modern OpenRA builds require CPU instructions that the Pentium II simply doesn’t have (SSE/SSE2). Even if the executable is 32-bit, it’s still compiled assuming a much newer baseline for hardware. Windows XP + a Pentium II is way below the minimum supported environment for current OpenRA releases, so Windows just throws the “Not a valid Win32 application” error.

There were much older OpenRA builds from over a decade ago that had lower requirements, but even those generally expected at least a Pentium III or early Pentium 4 to run comfortably.