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Vista Games Cracked to Run on XP
Next Generation is reporting that Vista PC games have been cracked to run under XP. Hacking groups who apparently wanted to play new titles like Shadowrun and Halo 2 with driver support have taken it upon themselves to open up the playing field a bit. "The news is sure to irk Microsoft who may now face an increased delay in some consumers adopting Vista at this early stage. However, it shouldn't come as a surprise. Earlier this month Falling Leaf Systems said in a press release that it believed Microsoft was deceiving consumers by stating that the titles would only work on Vista, and announced its intentions to release compatibility software to disprove the claim. 'Microsoft has, in typical Microsoft fashion, decided to launch their forced migration onslaught in full force with the release of two games that will only run on Windows Vista,' said Falling Leaf Systems CEO Brian Thomason in the press release." Relatedly, Mitch Gitelman of the (now closed) FASA Studios has taken exception to negative reviews of Shadowrun.
This angers me as well, especially when the product box is wrong. For example, I bought a Streamzap PC remote which claimed to work with Windows XP (all versions), but somehow that didn't include XP x64 edition. I might add that Streamzap does not reply at all to support questions that involve XP x64.
This brings up an interesting question of if this hack works with XP x64.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
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This wasn't Falling Leaf, it was the crack group Razor 1911.
Falling Leaf hasn't released anything.
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You ignore one small detail: Microsoft is a convicted criminal monopolist. They are not allowed to (among other things) leverage their OS dominance into coercing people or companies to buy other MS products. This example is the other way around (using DX10 games to push Vista sales) but any such behavior on Microsoft's part is questionable under their legal status.
I take this to mean that you haven't purchased a console in quite a few years. DreamCast emulation is still spotty at best, and PS2 emulation is crap. Even PS1 emulation still has issues. GBA works great, but DS? Not a chance. Nor PSP.
As for "why wouldn't I be able to play a game that runs on the same hardware", take a look at Wine. At best, playing Windows games in Linux is slower and glitchy. At worst, impossible. They're still making great strides at it, but they aren't there yet.
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Well, from everything I've seen and heard, video tends to be "randomly slower" on Vista anyhow. My co-worker's dual-SLI cards ran like crap on Vista compared to XP, even with the latest drivers. One of my clients was complaining that his DVD playback was laggy and rough in Vista as well. Numerous complains have abounded in regards to poor game/video performance in Vista compared to XP. With that in mind, a little of such going the other way wouldn't be terrible. If I can run DX9 games in Cedega/Wine without noticeable issues (sometimes faster than XP, since the driver for my laptop isn't updated by the 'nix one is) then I'd say DX10 shouldn't be that huge an issue to run on something other than Vista too.
And as someone else already pointed out, the rules change when you're a monopoly. Especially a criminal one.
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Here is a link to their... umm... press release
There are lots of software that will claim they only run on "x" OS. When you call Tech Support to ask it it can run on something else they will say "It may run/you can run it on "y" OS but we do not support that config, etc. "You are on your own if you run it on that. [etc. etc.]"
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OpenGL is keeping *AHEAD* of Direct3D. We had Shader Model 4.0 (Geometry Shaders, aka "DX10") months before DX10. OpenGL has SM4 on WinXP, and D3D9 doesn't. That alone should provoke developers into switching. For years the argument has been about ease of programming and integration, but now OGL has concrete feature superiority over D3D on the most prevalent gaming platform in the world.
I'm fairly sure ID software are continuing to support games on other platforms (via OpenGL).
1 /1856212&from=rss), so the 'Games for Windows' strategy is hardly producing the monopoly I'm sure Microsoft are hoping for (although in the Windows domain it may help drive Vista adoption at some point for the above reasons).
EA even recently stated they would be releasing a bunch of games for the Mac (http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/1
You know before you buy it though that its only expected to work with Vista. Why would you purchase something you think might not work and then complain when it doesn't?
Nothing violates the doctrine of first sale; you are the original purchaser. Whether you like it or not, software is a product that is licensed (just like other products are). If you don't like the license, don't buy the game. Software should be different because there's high cost to create it, and it can easily be copied and thus needs to be protected.
Vertex shaders can't create new vertices.
With a geometry shader you can pass the video card one copy of a tree, and have the geometry shader turn it into a forest.
I was a developer for one of the cracked games in the article. I would really have enjoyed making this game available for XP and not just Vista. Believe me, it would have taken longer to finish because the test matrix would have been so much bigger, but it's so frustrating to finish a game that none of your friends can even play because they don't have the right OS and won't be getting it anytime soon. That's the thing though, at MSFT you have to drink the koolaid.
I have a hard time believing that using these games to leverage Vista was illegal. Stupid and annoying maybe, but not illegal. Believe me, us devs who actually *cared* about the game argued against this sort of product hobbling on a regular basis. Requirements like this get thrown at you constantly. If it was actually illegal we would have played that card for sure.
If it's piracy to redownload songs that I own on cassette (and still have the cassette, mind you), then yes, it's piracy to download cracked and modded versions of software that you already own.
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So, all of those things are supported without extensions? Or are they still prefixed with NV or EXT, which doesn't really count as "support?"
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I fail to see how it has any superiority, when the extensions you are mentioning are all IHV unique and the implementations are different across the board. Hell, you could do a ton of things that geometry shaders allow in directx 9 (and opengl), but the algorithms are forced to run on the CPU.
BTW, OpenGL 3.0 is the version that is supposed to bring opengl to par with directx10, by adding support for things like geometry shaders and refactoring of the api. If you are interested, you can read more about it at http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol002_1/. Or you can pretend like opengl is the best thing ever, and miles ahead of directx, when in reality, it has a lot of catching up to do.
You're right, but a more common example is letting the GPU hardware tesselate a curved surface or something. Your forest example sounds more like instancing.
The text in them is, via copyright law.
The music on them is, via copyright law.
The design of them is, via copyright law.
And the physical media you buy software on isn't licensed, but the software itself is, via copyright law.
You do not have the right to other people's creations on your own terms.
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I think the integration of DirectDraw, DirectSound, the input, etc.. helped. All in one is good when developing games. It allows you to focus on the game, not any technology or compatibility hurdles. Also, it's now much easier to develop in. Very easy actually. Say what you will about Microsoft, but their development tools, particularly those associated with DirectX have been very good.
Also, while Direct3d and OpenGL accomplish the same things, they are very different. OpenGL is a state machine, with a standard API. Direct3D directly bangs the hardware with a minimal driver, maintained by the manufacturer. You could argue that it's faster, in practice, sometimes it is and sometimes it is not.
OpenGL is more abstract, and has a set of functions that can be used through it's API, and it is then up to the hardware manufacturer to create a layer of communication (the driver) between the hardware and the OpenGL state machine. OpenGL drivers are more portable, but harder to make efficient. I think this is overall a little more robust. Functionality wise, they are both very close. I consider this almost irrelevant, because there are so many features in both, that game programmers have a hard time keeping up, and particularly are weary of using the bleeding edge. I've learned to program in DirectX and only a little in OpenGL. I can't say I have a clear favorite though.
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OpenGL was actually in the lead, and then got hamstrung by MicroSoft.
MS, SGi, and HP designed a standard called Fahrenheit for a new low level API that OpenGL and DirectX would plug into, where they would both write to a "Low Level API". And then applications would just right to whatever they wanted, making the OpenGL/DirectX war a moot point.
MS screwed SGI (surprise), and released DX7, were drastically late on releasing the low level API, finely released it as an "unsupported component" and never released an update.
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We're talking EULA, not copyright. Completely different.
But that's my point: if it's an extension, you don't know how "widely supported" it is, can't count on it to be there, and therefore can't [easily] code against it.
Right: Apache doesn't support PHP. An extension to Apache supports PHP. So in the system requirements for some PHP-based web system, it'll have to list "Apache, PHP extension."
Now, that's fine for something like that, because its target audience is server admins. But when you're talking about a game, you can't really say "this game requires OpenGL 2.1, foo_bar_NV, EXT_baz, etc. In fact, even requiring a particular major version is complex enough!
This is DirectX's advantage: if the system supports "DirectX 9," you know that exactly all of the features of Direct3D 9 are supported. If it supports "DirectX 10," you know that all features of Direct3D 10 are supported. You don't have to worry about writing multiple different sets of code to handle people that have NV_* vs. ATI_* vs. SGI_* vs. not having support at all, etc.
The bottom line is that, because of this, using advanced features in OpenGL becomes a pain in the ass compared to doing it in Direct3D. I really wish the OpenGL ARB would get their act together and standardize this stuff more quickly, because (as a Mac and Linux user) it really pisses me off that they've let it fall behind Direct3D.
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The highlights of DX10 aren't the shaders. The same shaders are avasilable in 9L. It's about the rebuilt lighter API, multithreading and graphics memory swap file.
OpenGL doesn't have the latter two AFAIK.
OpenGL apps can certainly be multi-threaded. There's probably a performance hit when you have to switch contexts between different threads. I bet DX10 abstracts this, if anything. I really can't see why this be attractive, outside of having multiple rendering windows spread across multiple monitors (or multiple buffers who's output could be further processed inside or outside the GPU?). This has probably changed substantially since the last time I messed with OpenGL (OGL v. 1.1 on an old SGI)
As far as a memory swap file... Basically, the last time I screwed around with OpenGL , you could prioritize which textures were to remain in memory, which would have priority over others, and other than this, OpenGL handled keeping the required textures in memory. With modern hard drives, I have a hard time believing that a "memory swap file" on a hard disk would be of that much benefit, unless texture sizes were plain gigantic, and the file system was terribly fragmented.
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