Had a dumb thought: what if someone in 2003 could run a local LLM on their machine? XP desktop, rolling hills wallpaper, maybe Winamp in the corner—and you just chat with an AI locally.

I saw there were some attempts on Reddit, so I tried it myself.

Cross-compiled llama.cpp from macOS targeting Windows XP 64-bit. Main hurdles: downgrading cpp-httplib to v0.15.3 (newer versions explicitly block pre-Win8), replacing SRWLOCK/CONDITION_VARIABLE with XP-compatible threading primitives, and the usual DLL hell.

Qwen 2.5-0.5B runs at ~2-8 tokens/sec on period-appropriate hardware. Not fast, but it works.

Video demoand build instructions in the write-up.

Claude helped with most of the debugging on the build system. I just provided the questionable life choices.