Minecraft on windows vista

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This is a guide for something that is completely useless
But maybe it’ll show up at the bottom of a search result some day if some other person wants to do this…
Alright I should just get into it:

Getting Minecraft in the first place
Probably the most important part of the whole thing.
First things first, you need a browser so you can login to Minecraft and download the needed files. Luckily, there’s a new browser for XP known as «Supermium»! The download site is here and on GitHub, though the first link lets you actually download it on the built in Internet Explorer.
It’s a pretty simple install, just run the file, it’ll extract, and hit install.

Now, you’ll need Java. The latest version that’s easily supported on XP is Java 8u152, though I recommend 8u52 instead (Archive.org link here). It’s just the normal Java installer, nothing special.

You may need to update the Windows certificates, which I recommend even if it wasn’t required. You can get those here, you need the WindowsRoot.sst and WindowsIntermidiate.sst files. It’s a bit weird to explain here for a Minecraft guide, so I’ll link the official instructions instead: Link

For our launcher, we’ll need to look to sources other than the official Mojang Launcher. MultiMC is supported on XP, but there’s a feature it’s missing that means we won’t be using it for this. Instead, we’ll use ATLauncher (Unrelated to a certain illegal Minecraft Launcher), which you can download here. I used the Portable Setup .exe, which surprisingly works fine. If you get a warning at launch, just ignore it.

Now, you can login to your account using the browser we installed earlier. There should be a «Accounts» button, or something similar, which has a «Login with Microsoft» button. From here just follow the instructions, but I would recommend against saving your password in the browser, since it’s better to be save on a OS like this.

Now: You should be able to install Minecraft versions up to 1.16.5! But, that’s not what the title of this post says… so:

Getting newer versions running
This is the hard part. Well- not really hard, just annoying to figure out.
Make a 1.21.1 instance, speficially with Fabric Loader v0.15.11. Now, there’s a mod we want to add, this mod. This is the main piece to the whole thing, since this mod lets us play newer versions on Java 8, which we NEED, since there’s no way to install newer Java versions. (By the way, make sure to install the .jar file, not the source code!)

This is the most important step, but there’s still one more thing we need to do.
For this step, you’ll want to make a instance of 1.16.5 on a DIFFERENT MACHINE, NOT ATLAUNCHER and run it. After it’s run, there’s nothing else we need to do here, just close it. Now, go to the root folder of the launcher (I tested this on Prism Launcher, it should be the same on MultiMC, but I can’t say anything about other launchers.)

You’ll want these two files
LauncherRoot\libraries\org\lwjgl\lwjgl-openal\3.2.2\lwjgl-openal-3.2.2-natives-windows.jar
LauncherRoot\libraries\org\lwjgl\lwjgl-stb\3.2.2\lwjgl-stb-3.2.2-natives-windows.jar

Put them on a USB drive and then put that USB drive on the XP machine.
Rename the files to say «3.3.3» instead of «3.2.2»

Now, go to these directories on the XP machine:
LauncherRoot\libraries\org\lwjgl\lwjgl-openal\3.3.3\, and put the OpenAL file here (If asked to replace a file, accept)
LauncherRoot\libraries\org\lwjgl\lwjgl-stb\3.3.3\, and put the STB file here (If asked to replace a file, accept)

There’s one KEY thing you need to do here. Once those files are put in place, right click them, go to properties, and set it as read-only. You NEED to do this for both files, or else they’ll be replaced by newer versions and cause the game to not launch.
After this is all done, try launching 1.21, and it should hopefully just work! You could try adding mods, but the only one I’ve gotten to work is Sodium so far.

Thanks for listening to me talk about how to play Minecraft on a outdated operating system for about 700 words!
Bye for now!