Windows 7 support for Blender 3.0
This repository contains a compatibility DLL for running Blender 3.0 on Windows 7 and a patch to modify the Blender source to use it. It does this by prepending bcompat7 to the list of libraries so it uses the entry points in it instead of those in the system libraries.
Stable releases, compiled from the same commit as the official releases, are available on the Releases page.
More recent builds, including pre-release versions, are provided by Loriem: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/eufffe60fvtr9mz/AAA0YtogOoJTKggWtgAXRyXJa?dl=0
Build Blender following these instructions: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Building_Blender/Windows with a small change.
Before running make update, copy bcompat7.patch into the blender source tree and run git apply bcompat7.patch (there will be some warnings about whitespace, they can be ignored) then continue with the guide.
To use the your own build of this compatibility DLL, overwrite the files in the lib/win64_vc15/bcompat7 directory created after running make update.
In addition to this DLL, api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll is required to run Blender because of Python. A version of this library for Windows 7 can be found here: https://github.com/nalexandru/api-ms-win-core-path-HACK