Because it's fun to see if it's possible

1. Download the .zip file from the releases page: https://github.com/PANCHO7532/love2d-xp/releases (you're encouraged to download the one for your processor, in doubt, download the x86 one for 32-bit systems)
2. Unzip it to a clean folder (as in, an empty folder with nothing inside)
3. Execute love.exe, if you can see the "no game" screen, then the engine is working!
4. Drag your .love file to love.exe or the folder with your game files in order to load your game.

You need a linux distribution. Period. No Windows (unironically), no MSYS (probably), just Linux!

You will need a MinGW compiler that's targeted/built specifically for Windows XP compatbility, this is because LOVE will depend on libgcc and libstdc dlls and those have to be compiled for XP as well in order to avoid function calls on those dlls that aren't present on XP.

I recommend you to get yourself the UCRT-posix flavor of MinGW, as it's more modern and theoretically more stable than MSVCRT (though I made modifications that hopefully support both of those), builds offered on the Releases page of this repository are also compiled with UCRT.

The instructions vary according the linux distribution, the general gist for Ubuntu is running:

sudo apt install build-essential gcc gcc-multilib g++ cmake make mingw-w64 binutils-mingw-w64 mingw-w64-common mingw-w64-tools mingw-w64-i686-dev mingw-w64-x86-64-dev

Builds generated in this repo are compiled with Alpine Linux for UCRT compatbility, if you're on Alpine, then run these:

apk add cmake make gcc g++ musl-dev linux-headers mingw-w64-binutils mingw-w64-crt mingw-w64-gcc mingw-w64-gcc-ccache mingw-w64-headers mingw-w64-headers-doc mingw-w64-winpthreads mingw-w64-winpthreads-doc

Spin up a terminal on this directory and write cmake -B build -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=mingw32.cmake

If you want to prepare the build for 64-bit, change the command part where it says mingw32 to mingw64

Execute cmake --build build --target love --config Release and pray

By default, binaries are seemengly not moved properly in one-folder, you need to grab love.dll (libliblove.dll in some cases) and love.exe from build/love and put it on a clean directory, then grab the compiled luajit in bin directory, libmpg123, OpenAL32.dll, SDL2.dll from their respective directories on build directory, and finally, libgcc*.dll, libstdc++6.dll and libwinpthread-1.dll from /usr/(arch)-w64-mingw32/bin, where (arch) might be i686 if you targeted 32 bits, x86_64 if you targeted 64 bits. (If you can't find any of these last dlls, check the lib or lib64 folder as distros sometimes put them there)

Once you've got all the DLLs in one single folder, including the executable for the engine, you can now safely run love.exe

Currently I'm stuck with an laptop that has Windows XP x64 SP2, and I want to compile stuff for it just to see how "modern" software holds up on old-systems, Love2D is one of them.

I personally think that a modern game engine running on XP is hilariously awesome and interesting to see, so I'll be treating this repo as a playground to see if I can make it work.

By disabling a lot of code, pasting equivalent functions for modern functions and a little bit of love it surely can compile!

MinGW is the compiler of choice in this journey, not only it can compile for Windows XP with a few defines, but it can theoretically go as far as NT 4! Though with the current state of LOVE2D, the hard stop will be Windows XP anyway.

This repository is a fusion of the megasource/love2d repos in order to keep the dependencies and engine code in one-place for convenience.

I'm a solo-dev on this little side-project. If you want to collaborate, then feel free to do so! Currently I'm on college so new changes won't be rolling out as often as I'd like to.

Megasource is a CMake-buildable collection of all LÖVE dependencies.

It is currently only officially supported on Windows, but may also work on macOS. It could certainly also work on Linux, but good package managers makes megasource less relevant there.

This repository uses git tags for the library dependencies of a specific released version of LÖVE.

For in-development versions of LÖVE, there may be a branch in this repository corresponding to a similar branch in the love repository.

• Windows.
• LOVE 12+: Visual Studio 2019 or newer.
• LOVE 11 and older: Visual Studio 2013 or newer. Official builds of LOVE 11 and older use Visual Studio 2013.
• CMake 3.1 or greater.
• NSIS if you want to build the LÖVE installer.

To build just the dependencies for 64 bit x86 using Visual Studio 2019:

$ git clone https://github.com/love2d/megasource megasource
$ cd megasource
$ cmake -G "Visual Studio 16 2019" -A x64 -H. -Bbuild
$ cmake --build build --target megatest --config Release

... or you can open the solution file in Visual Studio and build from there instead of invoking cmake --build.

To build for a different version of Visual Studio (or a different build tool), replace "Visual Studio 16 2019" with one of the other build system generators. For example Visual Studio 2022 is "Visual Studio 17 2022".

Similarly, to build for a different architecture than 64 bit x86, use a different architecture name for the -A parameter.

Note that -H has been replaced in CMake 3.13 with -S.

If you want to build LÖVE, clone LÖVE into the libs folder. Megasource will automatically look for it there. E.g.:

$ git clone https://github.com/love2d/megasource megasource
$ cd megasource
$ git clone https://github.com/love2d/love libs/love
$ cmake -G "Visual Studio 16 2019" -A x64 -H. -Bbuild
$ cmake --build build --target love/love --config Release

The binaries can be found in build/love/Release.

If you want to build the installer, replace the previous build command with:

$ cmake --build build --target PACKAGE --config Release

A zip with the binaries and the installer will appear in build.