Heroic tinkerer revives Windows 7 and gets Steam and Silksong running on it, so take that Microsoft and your constant nagging to upgrade to Win11

Can Windows 7 Run Silksong? - YouTube

We are t-minus 15 days until Microsoft finally kills off support for Windows 10 (that is, unless you fork over the cash for its extended support updates or are fortunate enough to live in the European Economic Area), and everyone's rightly miffed about being cajoled into moving to Redmond's Copilot-infested, upsell-nagging, taskbar-in-the-middle-having* Windows 11.

Okay, to be fair, it's not an easy process. Steam stopped officially supporting Win7 as recently as January 2024, which means even getting the client running is a headache. ChrisPro had to root around in their Steam install and kill off a couple of dll files to trick the client into booting. Once it did, the entire experience had an ominous red message reading "Steam will stop running on Windows 7 in 0 days" looming over it.

Then, Steam pitched a fit when they tried to download Silksong, refusing to progress any further than 657.5 MB. That meant having to download Silksong on a separate, modern machine and copy its entire directory over. Then, there was a lot of faffing about with community-made Win7 kernel extenders and various Knowledge Base downloads. But when the moment of truth came… Silksong ran. After throwing one more error for tradition's sake.

Not only did it run, it ran well, on a device running on integrated graphics on Win7. Which, hey, Silksong is a 2D metroidvania—hardly GTA 6—but I'm still impressed it ran with barely a hitch on hardware that looks like a Babbage difference engine compared to our modern-day rigs. ChrisPro even managed to get past Moss Mother, playing on KBAM no less.

Hollow Knight: Silksong Simple Key - Pebb — (Image credit: Team Cherry)

Perhaps it's a testament to Silksong's optimisation, but to me it feels more like a testament to the community of lunatic tinkerers that effectively keeps our whole international IT infrastructure afloat. The beauty of PC gaming is that, for every unhinged use case you can imagine, there's almost certainly someone who had it before you, and who had the frontier spirit necessary to gin up the tools necessary to make the whole thing work.

Now we just need to get Silksong running on the actual best Windows, XP, and I'll be set for life.

*I actually don't mind the Win11 taskbar. It's fine.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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