Hello, I am a complete beginner with an interest in making games on a older Windows XP computer with 512mb of ram and a pentuim 1.8ghz cpu. I've been looking around on the site reading articles on beginning out using newer and current game engines like Unity and Unreal engine to get started in developing games. And since I don't have a PC capable of running such software as of right now, so this is what I have to work with for the moment.I would appreciate it if you guys could give me suggestions,advice or links to older software I could use for my PC.

Computer industry isn't know for keeping old stuff around for long. Most people here use modern stuff, and don't keep old stuff around. That holds very much for games, which are always at the edge of what is possible today.

My guess is your best bet is the Internet. Search for game software for your platform.

Programming languages evolve slower, you may have more luck there. You don't say what programming experience you have, but if you have none, you could look for Python (python.org), Java (oracle.com), or C# (not sure how fast the latter evolves, maybe too fast for your platform). The problem then moves to getting supporting libraries. I don't know how far back you can find old versions for that, but the search engine is your friend!

 I don't have any programming experience and have been looking for books online to start out. I'm particularly interest in learning C++ and Pyhton ,along with Java possibly as well. The games l would like to begin making are simple 2d games like pong or even tic tac toe.   

try pygame.org

The web application route is the one I am following, it may work for you. I like it because its easy to distribute (passing a URL instead of an install file) and you can offload the resource intensive stuff to the web server.

Python is commonly available on web servers and works well for back-end stuff so you can use it to run the logic of your game. There is a free hosting (with well defined limitations) for python here: 

https://www.pythonanywhere.com/

Python can also call C++ DLLs so you can re-use your own or someone else's C++ code in your game. For a finished game you can write the UI in Javascript/HTML with HTTP as a communication medium.

That's a lot of layers (and languages) to work through if you have limited experience...I would suggest installing Python 2 or 3 (I use 2 but whatever) and write a command line game in python (tic tac toe).

Once that works, I would suggest converting it to a web application and writing the UI (board and stuff) in HTML with SVG elements for display. Javascript can do asynchronous calls to the server and be a client side back-end.

If you want to look there is some sample code here for tictactoe:
https://github.com/coffeeaddict19/tictactoe

I would like to recommend the Love2D framework. I'm not sure what the requirements are, but it seems pretty lightweight. It uses the Lua programming language and it's very straightforward to start making 2D games in. The advantage of learning Lua is that it's often used in game development in combination with other languages, such as C++.

Lua has some good documentation over here.

On 12/8/2017 at 9:35 PM, topple28 said:

Hello, I am a complete beginner with an interest in making games on a older Windows XP computer with 512mb of ram and a pentuim 1.8ghz cpu. 

You have three obstacles here:

1. Windows XP is greatly outdated; I have been bitten by it years ago. Some functions are not there, whole subsystems are missing. Solution: go Linux®. 
2. 512MiB of RAM are barely enough to run the IDE (the smart text editor you'll be writing your programs in). The engines you mention will most likely malfunction.
3. You have a single core. In my experience modern systems take for granted at least a dual-core is available. Your measurements will most likely be screwed big way in a way or the other.

If budget is a concern to you, I would suggest a Raspberry Pi3 which for 40 bucks is a far more reliable and stimulating programming environment (also comes with twice the RAM and can arguably run a modern web browser).

Ah, btw, as much as doing tic-tac-toe on Unreal might sound cool, I'd suggest starting from the basics.

As a side note:

14 hours ago, CoffeeAddict19 said:

The web application route is the one I am following, it may work for you. I like it because its easy to distribute (passing a URL instead of an install file) and you can offload the resource intensive stuff to the web server.

No. Absolutely not. What the server does is connect the players. You don't want any heavy-duty processing going on the server, you'll be paying $$$ for saving nothing to the client; client performance is free to use for you; server time isn't. 18 months ago I bought a smartphone for 70; it runs on battery and still has plenty of juice for everything I thrown at it.

Be warned that running Windows XP on the internet today is positively dangerous, given that it is not being actively protected against all the malware that exists targeting it now.

I would second the suggestion for PyGame - it's a good learning environment for simple 2D games.

I'd imagine using any modern engine on that old of a machine is going to be a challenge.  I don't think there's going to be an easy route in this case.  Maybe you could skip the premade engine and go strait for C++/OpenGL.

 I'll certainly be looking into Python along with love2d and the possibility of installing a linux distro on my PC. I Thank you all for the help and advice!