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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
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?
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
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
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.
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