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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.
The games don't run on their new OS, by design. Even if it's something as simple as "check if OSVER=Vista" or what have you, that means the game won't run on anything but Vista. It's not illegal, it's just a load of crap, as those who are working against said crap are proving.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
Maybe they do, but we as consumers also have the right to call them on the carpet for it. And, for that matter, the right to modify the software to overcome those artificial limitations. (This isn't a matter of piracy --- this sort of hack has nothing to do with whether or not the game or the OS is pirated.) Just because someone has the right to do something does not mean it's right to do it. Microsoft is morally wrong here, even if their actions are legal.
I can't tell you how many games I've bought that I've put in at least 3 different computers with different brands of dvd drives and none of them could read the disks because of securom copy protection. In every case I've gone p2p and found hacked versions. It is a sign of how good their "copy protection" is when someone who has bought the games can't install them but the pirates have no problem ripping them.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
At best, playing Windows games in Linux is faster(1) and more stable(2).
1) BF1942 and World of Warcraft are two examples. Linux' superior underlying architecture (disk access, memory management, filesystem stuff, etc) more than offsets the few percent performance loss in API call translation. Myself and many others get 5-10% higher framerates and lower load times in a number of Windows games when running them in Linux.
2) I love seeing in my debug log "The game would have crashed here in Windows.", and the game keeps running just fine in wine or cedega.
Plenty of Win95 and Win98 games don't run on anything newer than Win2000. Plenty of WinXP games don't work on Vista. Every week MORE Windows games work in Linux. Continue that trend long enough and Linux is going to have better Windows compatibility than Windows does.
OpenGL is keeping *AHEAD* of Direct3D. We had Shader Model 4.0 (Geometry Shaders, aka "DX10") months before DX10.
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.
Virtually no other product on the planet is licensed. My books aren't licensed, my CDs aren't licensed, my shoes sure as hell aren't licensed. There are high costs to create CDs, and there's no license for those. Case law, such as Novell v. Network Trade Center, already suggests that such licensing for software is most likely unconstitutional anyways. The myth that software is somehow special is full of legal holes. Again, why should software be any different?
I'm currently a student of mechanical engineering with a heavy emphasis on CAD. You'd think the big companies like AutoDesk would prefer to make it easy for students to learn the software's ins and outs by offering a nice student discount, or maybe some sort of "student edition" of the program. Have you priced a Pro E solution? it's ridiculous! The thing i find insane about the whole deal is that the heavy anti-piracy measures taken are extremely frustrating to get past--however not impossible, but there is no real logical need for them in the first place. I mean, sure the per-license cost is extremely high, but the price of the software is a drop in the bucket for most shops when compared to the price of just a single machine. My school just purchased a rapid prototype machine (which is really freaking cool, btw) that cost $30k, not including the ABS material needed to use the damn thing. Basically, my point is this: no one is pirating AutoDesk software to use in a production environment. A quick torrent search shows that there are, in fact, many people pirating the software. So the question now is whom? The short answer is: students. When i graduate i plan on working as a draftsman for a while before opening up my own shop, at which point i will purchase a fully-licensed Pro E solution. How many hundreds of dollars more will i be paying for this software to offset the cost of AutoDesk paying software engineers to keep students from using it for doing homework? I'll end this little tirade with a question: if the main purpose of a software suite is to engineer and manufacture parts in a professional environment, is there any real value taken away from the makers of the software if said software is pirated and used for anything other than a production environment? Are teenagers without access to a plotter, let alone a CNC machine really eating away at profits?
"Luke, you've switched off your targeting computer, what's wrong?"
Why exactly did Direct3D take off, anyway? Other "standards" of MS's have failed. OpenGL was already a success, in the high-end world. Was it just too high-end 3D for the low-end-3D game devs back when D3D started out? Maybe they've gradually grown up with D3D now, and are more comfortable with it?
D3D used to have a more high-level layer than OpenGL, I think (right?), but no one used it because it was slow. Was that at least a factor in drawing people in, even if they had to move to more low-level stuff to get performance?
Or is it did hardware manufacturers go with D3D for some reason, and everyone else had to follow? It did seem like Quake was the only thing forcing gaming gfx card manufacturers to implement OpenGL for a while there. That might even be more the case now (I'm not sure; haven't used windows in a LONG time).
Is there something about OpenGL implementation that's harder? Does it make it easier to identify cards with crappy performance, or something?
I've fiddled with both.
In terms of usability and ease of use from a programmer's perspective, the two libraries are practically identical. It is fairly trivial to create an abstraction layer that provides common functionality between the two libraries.
However, from my experiences and (limited) knowledge of both libraries, DirectX does have more features and does develop at a quicker pace than OpenGL. DirectX is owned and developed by one single proprietary entity with greed as incentive for a quick development pace (negative tone unintentional), whereas OpenGL is an open standard with an organization body to oversee it's development, which tends to be slower (read: more calculating and cautious about what they add/keep out of the library).
That being said, OpenGL doesn't aim specifically at games (which is DirectX's primary intention), but aims to be a general Graphics Library. It's used for other things besides games, such as medical software.
The performance of the libraries depends on a huge number of different variables; OS, graphics card/driver, aptitude of the programmers to utilize the specifics of each libraries' strenghts, etc.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the extremely relevant precedent set by Age of Empires III. Although I exclusively run GNU/Linux now, at the time of Age of Empires III's release in November of 2005 I was running Windows 2000 Pro with no intention of ever using Windows XP. This isn't the time or place to discuss why I refused to use XP, but suffice to say that my experience getting AoE III to work foreshadowed what was to come in any Microsoft published game.
Being a fan of the earlier Age of Empires games, I acquired a copy of the newly released AoE III which turned out to list Windows XP as the only supported operating system. To my extreme (albeit momentary) dismay, running the setup.exe on the first game disc produced an error requiring an upgrade to Windows XP before installing the game. I simply refused to believe it, seeing as how 2000 and XP are extremely similar operating systems and that there's no technical reason this game would require one and not work on the other.
Five minutes of Googling later, I ran the setup.exe from the command prompt, passing the "/n" command line switch to the executable. This switch runs the game setup in network install mode: the setup program believes it is installing the game over a network, so it doesn't check the operating system version! Needless to say I just pointed the installer to a local directory and it installed without a hitch.
Even better is that the main game executable didn't require any patching. Directly after installation, the game ran perfectly under Windows 2000! Only the setup.exe on the game disc had the farse "XP-only" restriction, and a simple trick, built-in to the executable no less, proved that the operating system requirement was merely a shallow marketing decision by Microsoft to force people on to Windows XP.
This anecdote might be interesting for those who haven't played AoE III (or haven't tried getting it to run on another OS besides XP). It has taught me to never trust a game published by Microsoft, and because of my experience, as soon as I heard that Halo 2 PC was going to be Vista-only many months ago I instantly knew that it would be a superficial hack akin to the OS check on the AoE III setup.exe.
Of course there are going to be people who relish in being able to break this superficial and shallow marketing decision, but I'd like to send a big THANK YOU out to those who actually put the time and effort into doing so.