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.

[myulz]

Thanks Firelifetime. Yes I thought that might be the case. If it's compiled with "use SSE/SSE2" enabled it will produce code that won't run on a PII, but usually will run faster on machines that do have those instructions. I expect it not worth the effort of compiling a version in straight IA-32 when as you say it would struggle anyway.

I'm curious to know which the last version was (if any) that didn't need SSE as it might well run not so bad if a Pentium III would otherwise be acceptable. The SSE is really the only difference to speak of between the PII and the PIII and a twin PII 450 would easily match a low-end PIII.

I appreciate this seems a lot of effort for little benefit but I'm doing some research to put together a video about games that'll still run on pre SSE processors.

[myulz]

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!

Thanks for the response Maybellerant. Im a big fan of OpenRA, i play it a lot. Just putting together a research video about the pre-sse P6 architecture and what it can still run, hence my curious question. Managed to get quite a few titles to run like Minecraft and GTA San Andreas but OpenRA, even an early version, would be a big win