Second System 2.3: Windows 8.0/10/11 Support Added, Extra Qt 6 Support and More!

This new release of Second System extends support to Windows 8.0, 10 and 11 (pre-24H2). Windows 8.0 support (both release and some pre-release builds*) was added by popular demand. Windows 10 and 11 support is largely for comparative testing purposes, but with a view to resolving future compatibility issues that will face those operating systems in the future and backporting shell elements from earlier versions of Windows to replace their bug-ridden modern counterparts.

There are also various improvements targetting specific applications on all platforms:
-dnsapi Windows 10 function stubs have been added, but there are still varying issues with the target application (the Spotify desktop application).
-cfgmgr32 issues have been corrected, which should improve BeamNG.drive compatibility on Windows 8.1.
-Application exclusions have been added for the DPI scaling application and all search indexing executables after reports of issues involving all of them.
-Application compatibility shims are now disabled when Second System is activated on a given application, after various conflicts occurred between the two.
-"Disable Second System" (or "Passive" mode) no longer loads the ntdll stub into the target application. This should eliminate any compatibility issues resulting from applications aggressively patching import tables or using DRM methods that reject the ntdll stub.
-Windows.UI.dll is now part of Second System. This improves compatibility with some Qt 6 applications, such as QBitTorrent. However, QBitTorrent utilizes newer DXGI extensions and requires Enhanced D3D11 Mode to run.
-Various issues with Git and Python applications (specifically generative AI applications such as ComfyUI) have been corrected on Windows 7 and below.
-The D3D11 Enhancement Pack is now compatible with Windows 8.0, in addition to Windows Vista and Windows 7. It is not required on Windows 8.1 and above.

Future usage of Windows 10 DLLs

In the vein of the D3D11 Enhancement Pack that transplants DXGI and D3D11 from Windows 8.1, there are strong indications that further ports of DLLs from Windows 10 may be required to achieve the full quantum of application compatibility on Windows NT 6.x. This includes:

• Spotify desktop application

• Microsoft Teams desktop application

• Google Chrome installer

• Rockstar Games Launcher

• Visual Studio 2026 IDE (it is possible to use the compilers and linkers with a considerably older version of the IDE, such as 2008 or 2010)

*specifically, build 8102. Warning: copy your MSVC++ 2015-22/2017-26 redist DLLs from a Windows 7 installation.

Updated 2025-12-07 at 0035 (UTC-5) for a minor change to the Windows 8.0, 8.1 and 10/11 packages to accomodate new DLL dependencies in Chromium 143 and up. And updated again only 27 minutes later after discovering a small issue in the UWP text scaling factor.