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Hacked DX10 for Windows Appears
Oddscurity writes "According to The Inquirer someone managed to write a wrapper allowing DirectX 10 applications to run on platforms other than Vista. The Alky Project claims to have reverse-engineered Geometry Shader code, allowing Windows games to run on Windows XP, MacOSX and Linux. The Inquirer is understandably cautious about these claims, urging readers to investigate the releases themselves to ascertain whether or not it's a hoax."
If nothing else, this can be a call to others to create similar projects. If the Alky Project is real (which it is by all accounts so far), then even if it is shut down, their work will continue. If it can't meet it's goals in some way, then it's full promise will remain as a focus for the great need to NOT 'upgrade' to Windows Vista, drawing in a large number of developers. It is also the promise that applications made for DirectX 10 may live beyond their operating environment.
This is very much a more direct refection of the same phenomenon that allows entire hardware systems to be emulated against the wishes of console, arcade and computer manufacturers.
This is the start of the market's reaction to Vista, made manifest.
Ryan Fenton
yup. from what i gather, many who entered the program are pissed because they payed $50 and have seen nothing come out of it yet. and this release seems to be nothing more than him trying to prove that he's actually working on it. it's not very functional.
i really hope he does succeed though. we really need something like this.
I downloaded it and everytime I start up a Direct X 10 tutorial it crashes out, the file sizes 400k also seem a little small.
I'd also like to know how he implemented Vertexs and Indexs since in DirectX 10 you allocate one buffer and it can be any type but under DirectX 9 you have to choose the type of buffer when you create it. Copying all that stuff into memory so you can allocate the buffer in the DirectX 10 drive at render time is going to slow things down a hell of a lot.
Still if it worked it would be very interesting for the wine project.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
With the (arguably) poor reception for Vista from the press and user communities and the (GPU) Hardware and Games writers obviously wanting to push DirectX 10 to help sales (ooo shiney AND blured!) is MS under non-trivial pressure to bring DirectX10 to XP? What are the chances of this happening?
Will we end up with a backlash where OpenGL is updated to include features parity of the DirectX10 cards and developers switching to using OpenGL as the driver layer so they get the XP market?
Or is that exactly what the project is?
If it's true it will be. See here
Why oh why must I be so gullible!?
Yes, I paid. I'm one of very few so far, apparently. At the time, I thought their focus was to make Windows games run natively on Linux, 1 at a time. (Meaning the game will work well and they won't move on to the next until it does.) The very next week, their focus is shifted to DX10. 'Cool,' I thought, thinking it was DX10 on Linux. I now see it's on Windows XP... Bleh. No answer from them on if they plan to make it work on Linux also.
$50 wasted.
See, I've -got- the money to spend on the hardware and the OS and all the upgrades for the next few years. That isn't the issue. I just want games to work on an OS with good moral character. Or at least neutral. I'd settle for 'not completely shady.' But nooooo.
By the way, their Linux demo that is only for paying people... It doesn't work on my system. There's no sound, and it crashes after the menu. They spent a couple weeks looking at it, but their final answer was 'We can't reproduce this bug' and 'we need to focus our effort on the product.' While I agree that's probably the right attitude at some point... When you've only got a very very few paying customers, you make ALL of them very happy so they'll bring in other paying customers.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
If that's what they did, then they broke what DirectX was about, simply because they wanted/needed a serious reason to force people to upgrade.
Do you recall the history of DirectX and how it wasn't ever supposed to be available on NT 4.0? What happened? They put it out for Windows NT 4.0 and then took it all the way up to version 5.something and eventually dropped DirectX for NT 4.0 support when practically nobody was using NT 4.0 as a Desktop OS anymore. They did the same with Windows 2000 DirectX Support, even though there was very little change between Windows2000 and Windows XP and now they are claiming total incompatibility, when there is little other reason for ANYONE to want to upgrade to Windows Vista...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I've seen 2 posts so far where you state that Vista has some superior "resource management" that will make a massive difference in between it and XP.
From my personal experience with Vista, everything runs slower than on XP. Identical binaries, identical versions, Vista is slower.
Why should DirectX 10 be any different?
You are still innocent until proven guilty. What's changed is what they do to innocent people. - notnAP, #26891325
You know that OpenGL has the same abilities as DirectX 10 (at least on DirectX 10 compatible hardware) thanks to some extensions added by NVIDIA. These extensions are available on Windows 2000/XP, Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD.
How come OpenGL can do it on those platforms, yet DirectX 10 can only do it on Vista?
RegardselFarto
If you don't use Aero and instead switch to Windows Classic Appearance, Vista works great on a wide variety of machines.
There are other issues that have made Vista a path to pain
Frankly, I can't see why there hasn't been a class action suit to get Microsoft to provide a free service-pack-3 style update to XP which includes all of Vistas supposed security enhancements, without the other features. After all, XP was clearly defective. Maybe the Vista security alerts being so annoying are one of the reasons that many don't want Vista even on new machines.
There also ought to be a class action to give users the right to transfer any previous XP license to another machine, even if just as a second or third OS on a Mac. However a user paid for it, if they paid they should be able to transfer the license.
Even if Vista does work properly on your hardware, some security features that many might expect (like bitlocker functionality to guard data when a laptop is stolen) isn't even included in the versions of Vista that most people are being stuck with.
Hopefully this portability for DX10 will reach a practical level. Any sort of lock-in to Vista should be avoided.
Vista + brown Zune = prior art problem (colonoscopy)
Halo 2 is a perfect example of Microsoft making something Vista-only with no technical reason whatsoever. Halo 2 Vista uses DX9 for its graphics, sound, etc., and is artificially restricted to Windows Vista only because it is published by Microsoft Games and Halo 2 is a popular game in the console world.
I've read that there actually are technical reasons why DX10 can't be trivially ported to Windows XP due to how it interacts with new driver models and other kernel-related things, but if Microsoft had separated the GUI from the kernel in the first place, this wouldn't be such a problem.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
No, but as far as I know, ATI and Intel haven't released DX10 parts yet. Some of the extensions added by NVIDIA are EXT_ (like EXT_texture_integer), which implies that multiple vendors have agreed on it. Others are NV_, and the NV_depth_buffer_float extension states that it was changed from EXT_ to NV_, probably because it couldn't be agreed upon before the release of the G80.
RegardselFarto
Anyone can sue anyone. I can sue you for ... umm... parking your car on my lawn.
You don't have a car? So what, I don't have a lawn.
Doesn't matter who sues who. Who wins the suit matters.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
and your evidence is from msdn, Microsofts very own propaganda outlet. Now that's what I call convincing...
Why do people keep perpetuating this misnomer?? If you don't use Aero and instead switch to Windows Classic Appearance, Vista works great on a wide variety of machines
If you have a capable video card (and if you don't, $30ish to get one is not really a big ask), you're far better off leaving Aero turned on and offloading it to the GPU. Going back to "Classic" mode can actually be slower, because the CPU is now doing all the work the GPU would otherwise be doing.
Microsoft® Visual C#®
By John Sharp, Jon Jagger
I was skimming along and found an interesting little note and attached code: At first I was thinking. Maybe he did it as an example of what not to do in a loop. (referring to the "!=") but the next "note" states: Now, I don't know about you, but I don't know ANY programmers that would do this. What would happen if something happened to your hardware (surge, heat, solar flare, misbehaving thread, etc.) and during your precious array loop something happened and your computer mis-interpreted your array length. You could have yourself a very fun infinite loop. But no worries. When the world is perfect, this will never happen and you should be more concerned that the index coming out of the loop is exactly the Length of your array. That seems to be more important than a possible infinite loop. Granted, if you have one of these stray events dogging your memory, you might have greater issues, but we all know computers today are not 100% accurate all the time. I guess that's why this guy stressed using try/catch for everything
Now, I don't claim to know about Microsoft's internal programming staff, but if this guy is on the team... that would explain a lot of things in Windows land.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Nothing in that link says it's impossible. Hell nothing in there says it that hard it just says that it require far more resources than Microsoft is willing to dedicate. Direct quote from the blog
"At some point, the question "to serve existing customers" or "to get new customers" is a question every business has to ask itself."
There nothing inherently bad about saying its a business decision but don't make it out to be anything other than a business decision.
I think the real question we are all asking ourselves is: can our modded xboxes running linix to emulate a powerpc running WinXP use this wrapper to allow us to play DX10 games? I mean how else are we going to play Halo 2? Ohh... wait... right
This is kinda offtopic, but I'm always amazed with what you call "old"/slow hardware. If all you do is surf the web and play solitaire, what kind of hardware do you think you need? Win95 was enough to run web browsers and solitaire! A Pentium I and 64Mb RAM is enough! I assure you that most tasks you do on a typical computer require less than 800Mhz to run perfectly fine. Sure, if you want to run the latest and greatest games, you do need a highest end PC, but for most people, that's not the case.
I wonder how much of this is caused by marketing and how much is caused by "buying ability" (ie: you buy because you can or because marketing makes you believe you need it?).
In my country we don't have that much extra money to buy a pc every year. Normally we buy computers every 5 to 10 years... And I dare say that with the latest procs it will be even further between updates (updating from a P2 to a P3 or P4 was a big change, updating an AMD 3000 to a 3600 isn't much difference).
Just so you know, WinXP minimal requirements are a P2 and 64Mb of RAM. And it actually runs quite well (better than win98 on the same hardware). I guess marketing makes people believe that unless you have 1GB of RAM and the latest proc it won't run fine...
Commercial software vendors will make their apps available on Linux when more users migrate to the platform.
More users will migrate to the platform when the apps they need are available.
Chicken.
Egg.
WINE short-circuits the dependency loop by allowing people who still need this or that Win32 app to migrate to Linux if they want to.
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