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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."
...you stingy bastards!
Even if he really managed to do this (which I doubt, look how long wine has been around and it still doesn't run everything), won't he get sued immediately for something like this?
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Squirrel
Well the first three letters are right...
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
We are hacking Windows apps to run them on Windows OS's.
Let the sadness ensue.
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.
It is a hoax according to Hans Phall
Seeing as how I do not like vista, on the basis that I like to be in control over what software I run. That being said I can't wait to run DX10 on my build of linux and my XP rig! we just need someone evil enough to prove it.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
If only windows were like Linux. I don't really mean in the open-source way, but more in the separate projects way. If DirectX was a separate project from the windows OS, then it would work on windows XP without us having to go hack it. There's no reason why DirectX 10 can't work on windows XP. It's just an artificial limitation that MS through in to get people to buy Vista. MS does this a lot, with IE, IIS, MS Office, DirectX, and many other tools. I don't see why people put up with it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
If he releases the code to the whole world, then who will they sue?
(write-line *coolsig*)
Imagine what the community of online coders could accomplish if the majority of them spent their time on useful projects.
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?
Even if it did, XP (the primary OS this would be desired for tbh) doesn't have the necessary resource management necessary to fuel the power needed for the graphics processing that DX10 takes advantage of. Sure, you might get it working, but it would be slow as heck.
. . but this screams "Getting gullible people to give me $50 for mostly snake oil"
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Well if so many tools out there weren't mindless lemmings, having to have the latest PC games and thus buying an OS they dont need, we could all send a message to M$ and the game writers that we're not interested in buying into their planned obsolescence.
M$ has functionally taught us that security is going to be something that's left up to us.....so OK, no sweat, redmond......BTW, I won't be needing the OS you spent many many millions developing, thanks.
> The Inquirer is understandably cautious
Wow, now there's a sentence I never expected to see in print!
and shouldn't be deriving anything meaningful from this.
I'm just happy you're not the ones making any decisions about the future of any sort of tech.
Or is that exactly what the project is?
He said _useful_ projects.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I already wrote a DirectX 11 emulator for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum! Booya b*tchez I'm da hacka p1mp! Who wants to send me $500?
It looks like Wine (Codeweaver) for MacOS X 10.4 Intel-PC.
Prey is NOT a DX 10 game but a DX 9 game which works more or less okay in WineHQ/CW.
My favourite operating system is ReactOS; binary compatible to WinNT series
AC sir.. that link of yours is #$@#$in saved.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
How fast will MS push out DX 10.1 or some other small update to make this stop working like what they have done in past.
They did things like this with win32s and os/2
Cody has been around for quite a while. He worked for mp3tunes dot com and helped code their locker project. He , as I remember, started coding right out of diapers, and i think he worked with DVDJon for a while... lets not discount this "pre-alpha" release just yet.. the kid knows how to code.
The only thing I saw on the fallingleafsystems.com site was a youtube/google-video clip of Prey running in windowed mode on Mac OS-X. Now I'm not exactly sure, but isn't Prey a modded Doom3 engine - which was OpenGL and cross platform, being able to run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS-X? So their only example of DX10 working on a non-Vista or even XP machine not only doesn't use a DX10 example, its not even a DX9 (or any DX) example...
The whole point of TFA is that this is a reverse engineering and re-implementation of DX10.
It's not just someone finding a way to install Vista's DX10 on XP (which would be technically very hard, near to impossible, because DX10 relies on some new feature of Vista's kernel. Reportedly to give a more direct "console-like" access to hardware for games. Probably in fact to make less likely a backport and force people upgrading OS).
It's that they (pretend) that they have reverse engineered DX10 and created (their own) wrapper to run DX10 software on non-Vista platform. As some DX10 functionality is implemented in the wrapper itself, it is supposed to even work on hardware that may lack some of this functionality in hardware. Maybe some DX10-to-DX9 wrapper ? Or DX10-to-OpenGL2 ? The fact is that this wrapper is supposed to work not only older versions of Windows, but also on Mac OS X and Linux. Either because it's a DX10-to-OpenGL2 wrapper (just like Wine provides a DX9-to-OpenGL wrapper), or because it's a DX10-to-DX9 wrapper running on top of the wine's DX9-to-OpenGL.
But the whole stuff doesn't involve installation of DX10 and thus could benefit to wine, reactos and/or Cedega, specially if it's appended as a newer DX emulation code. They already have similar DX9 wrappers. DX10 could be added to wine with that project, even if it needs some older DX underneath (already available legally in wine).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I know everybody wants to believe that Microsoft arbitrarily decided that DX10 would be Vista only so they could "force" people into buying the OS, but, as usual, it's a tiny bit more complex than that.
DX10 relies heavily on graphics card memory virtualization. The new Windows Display Driver Model, WDDM, introduces this feature. In order to accomplish this, it required a lot of low level kernel changes. So many, in fact, that back-porting it to XP would basically make XP's kernel into Vista's kernel.
There comes a point where you just have to say that a particular feature is only available in Vista. DX10 fits that bill.
If I have an XP system, it's probably not equipped with the latest graphics card.
If I'm adding an abstraction/emulation layer, it's probably adding significant code to be executed.
Chances are that my performance is going to take a measurable, if not fatal, hit for any but the latest hardware.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Being that Cody Brocious is 19, who wants to take bets that he'll rename the project in a couple years? Maybe something along the lines of... Alky-Hall Project?
About a month ago, I replaced the aging nVidia 6800 card in my aging 3.5 GHz desktop PC with an ATI X1950 graphics card that I picked up for about £120 ($200 approximately). I then put on Far Cry, a game from 2004-odd, was able to turn up all the graphics options to full on a 1280x1024 LCD monitor and ended up playing a game that, in my middle-aged view, was giving me almost photo-realistic graphics - and all this within DirectX 9.
I appreciate that people might want to play on big screens and wide screens these days, meaning that they possibly want 1600x1200 (or whatever) displays, but I'm finding it difficult to understand what DirectX 10, and therefore Vista, can possibly bring to the "gaming table" anyway.
Yes, I accept that some people quite like the idea of accelerated 3D desktops (I personally cannot think why) but the fact is that a lot of people use XP (myself included) purely because of it's ability to run games. And if games graphics are already *THAT* good, what more do gamers actually want that isn't currently being done by a reasonable graphics card, a recent game and DirectX 9?
I'd love someone to explain it to me because I really don't see what the great "hooha" is about DirectX 10.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
and test it out! Oh wait...
...it is a major strike against Microsofts Vista deployment plan since the only real improvment is DirectX 10 (sorry, but that's the fact, the rest are either eyecandy gimmicks or DRM "features").
It is on the other hand a very good argument not to look for a Windows alternative so MS will not kill it, it may even make them release a crippled DX10 for Win XP.
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
Alky is supposed to be released under the GNU LGPL. Where's the source code?
if this is true, it would be good news for the developers of W.I.N.E. It'll make it slightly easier to run Windows games on Linux.
\
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...
I will probably get modded into oblivion for the subject alone, but hear me out...
I think WINE is a waste of effort on the part of the development team. Not to say they haven't done some really cool things, but to me, hacking together a system to run Windows apps on Linux seems counter-intuitive to the whole IDEA of Linux/OSS/FSF and the vast community of supporters.
So you can run Outlook, IE, some games or whatever, from a community that gripes about innovation, that isn't all that striking an accomplishment to me. By doing so the message, to me at least, to developers of "Windows Only Software" is "Go ahead, make Windows software instead of Linux native apps. We'll show you. We'll just run it in WINE!" Way to go, you just validated their business plan/model. They have no reason to make a Linux native app.
These DX10 guys and WINE and the Cedega people... Why do you want Linux to be seen as a "Me too!" platform? If the effort in these projects was spent creating Linux native applications that blew Windows software away, Linux would achieve broader acceptance more quickly and MS would sh_t themselves.
Again I am not trying to limit the impact of these projects, but it just doesn't make sense to me anymore.
No sig for you!!
If this project pans out, and you can run DX10 games and applications on Windows XP systems running DX10 hardware, Microsoft has some definate explaining to do; their claims that DX 10 would only work on Vista will be busted. I imagine these guys will get sueded into oblivion by Microsoft, but Microsoft would be forced to admit that DX 10 COULD run on Windows XP systems and thus people don't need to run Vista in order to run DX 10 games. Definately hoping this pans out.
I've payed far more than $200 to play a single game. Millions of people are spending $250 to bowl on their TVs (Wii).
If and when the killer game comes out for Vista I'll spend the $200 on Vista (plus another $200-$2000 to buy the right machine to run it).
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
and who is your information source for that? Microsoft?
I would like to see an unbiased report on how difficult it really is, of if it couldn't be some how hacked around.
Mount Evans built on top of Longs Peak would be like Mount Everest!
are you running low on ideas for new acronyms ?
DX10 has been a product of Yamaha for years and years.
A decision was made early on in the process of DX10 that compatibility with NT 5.x would NOT be a design goal. Compatibility with NT 5.x was only relevant to Longhorn technologies that would be used on corporate servers -- specifically Windows 2003 Server -- as Longhorn Server would not be coming out for some time.
So, with that restriction lifted, they could look at ways to re-architect DX10 to better address concerns that they had with the existing model.
One issue that was previously difficult to address was that if you ran multiple monitors, you might try to run multiple Direct3D applications. But the API and driver model handled this sort of situation poorly, and one is reminded of the Windows 3.1 days. A poorly designed Direct3D application could starve other DirectX/Direct3D applications by not relinquishing control of the GPU (3d pipeline) often enough or allocating up all the free video memory (or allocating it burstily in varying amounts) which would cause other 3d apps to freeze, visually glitch, or have to deal with memory errors/timeouts.
DirectX 10 introduces a model where video memory and access to the GPU is managed like system memory and CPU scheduling. DirectX 10-compliant video drivers must provide primitives that conform to these new features.
In this fashion a DirectX 10 application can allocate as much texture memory as it wants; if it doesn't fit in the graphics card at display time, it is paged out to main memory (and if that's full), swapped out to disk just like anything else. And it can hammer on the GPU all it likes; if other apps try to use it, they will be given their fair-share timeslices and your rendering will be slowed down.
The Windows XP driver model has no infrastructure to allow for these features. The API could emulate them but I don't know how well that would work without some sort of hardware support in the card that I suspect is necessary for it to work correctly (especially with the virtual memory and paging in video RAM)
I doubt that feature even works at all with AGP. It's probably PCIe only.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
There was a proliferation of sound APIs back when computers had clockspeeds under 1GHz and SSE took way too many cycles if it stalled. Nowadays we have SSE3 that can do DSP ops on like 16 samples at a time in one cycle, advanced cache technologies, multicore processors running at 2GHz+... these can handle environmental audio entirely in software for a very small slice of the CPU. Mixing 64 channels and applying simple FIR filters is child's play.
No reason to waste a PCI slot and have to deal with a propietary interface if you don't need it. All you need is an AC97 endpoint per speaker pair, or an optical out, and a decent stereo setup.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
You mean there are some games that are *only* supposed to run on Vista? My experience has been completely the opposite; I thought it was designed *not* to run any games...
(Just got my son a new laptop, and we're thinking we'll have to "upgrade" it to XP, so we can play half the games he likes.)
(And the cancel/allow thing is beyond silly; having to do that more than once for a single install, is just crazy.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
"The Inquirer is understandably cautious about these claims, urging readers to investigate the releases themselves to ascertain whether or not it's a hoax." So much for the rigor of investigative journalism.
I think this is a clear example of leveraging software to benefit the company. If a user wants to play it on their PC, they have to run Vista and/or upgrade their computer. Otherwise you have to go buy a not-inexpensive limited-purpose console. Both options benefit Microsoft.
It's absolutely their right, and it absolutely sucks. As has been said elsewhere in this thread.. the technology used in Halo 2 doesn't require DX10. Maybe I could be coaxed into thinking that if Halo 2 only played on the Xbox 360, but the fact that they have it running on the original... grrrr...
I've been on the verge of going one route or another for some time now, so I feel that Halo 2 is definitely something that will help drive Vista sales. Gamers are more likely to be early adopters, and hanging a popular game out there that only runs under Vista would probably be enough to make a lot of them bite the bullet, even if they were already very happy with their XP rig.
As for me, I was ranting about this very issue with a coworker, and he ended up offering to let me borrow his XBox and copy of Halo 2. I'd rather own the game, but neither option that would have me buying it sits well with me, so Microsoft gets none of my money and none of my goodwill.
You misunderstand why people are complaining, or they are complaining about the wrong thing...
Yes it does, but why? That is great for Vista's new user interface and running multiple apps at once, but it isn't necessary for geometry shaders. People are complaining about not having DirectX 10 on XP, but what they mostly want is prettier and faster graphics for their games. Microsoft could add that functionality to DirectX 9 so that people don't have to upgrade to Vista. They didn't do that though, preferring to force people to upgrade. There are two things keeping me tied to Windows now. One is Visual Studio (which I use for work and fun development). The other is games. I only have one main computer and I don't want to be rebooting all the time to run a game, or I would have Linux installed as my main OS. I certainly don't want to upgrade to Vista, and not having new DirectX 10 features in XP will probably make me hold off a long time in buying a video card.
I can run the emulator on my Beowolf cluster....more powerful than an NVIDIA Radeon 8000.
No sig today...
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2007-Ap ril/056237.html
... just a hello world d3d10 implementation which doesn't do much more than return D3D_OK on CreateDeviceAndSwapchain"
"From a quick look at the strings in the lib, they use opengl, but import only very, very basic
functions
This whole thing smacks of a scam to me, mainly as their "video evidence" is a video of the Prey Demo running on OS X. Being as you can download the prey demo for mac http://www.macgamefiles.com/detail.php?item=19386h ere and it is in fact native code, I don't see anything too startling here. My money says this is a huge hoax to get some students some money.
"Everlasting peace will come to Earth when the last man kills the last but one." - Adolf Hitler
But a fast usermode to kernel interface is difficult to get right. It's in large part why microkernel based operation systems are so hard to get working fast. Then there's GDI to contend with, and making any changes to GDI is troublesome. I believe much of the work done with Vista have been in battle with GDI. In fact, I heard that GDI is emulated on Vista. MS must have said "screw it" at some point, and sent GDI headfirst out of the kernel and into some emulated environment. BTW, if you want to know how troublesome GDI is you should check out the Stardock people. They made a theming engine on top of it (no small feat). I heard from unreliable sources that MS ended up licensing theirs for XP.
IIRC, hardware-accelerated sound was removed from Vista for 2 reasons:
1) Increased stability (now the audio drivers run in user-mode, instead of kernel-mode)
2) DRM enforcement - now nobody has direct access to the audio hardware, which closes off a potential avenue for making unauthorized copies of "protected" audio.
Correct me if I'm wrong.