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.

Comments

Nothing new under the sun

[seanadams.com]

I once bought a set of OrCad software for $13K, but even after several calls to tech support I could not get the parallel-port security dongles to work properly. I even got a replacement set of dongles from them and it still didn't work reliably. So I downloaded a crack for it, and then everything was fine.

When you have to download a pirated version just to use the software you've legitimately paid for because of artificial limitations like this, it doesn't exactly install a lot of goodwill in the customer. I never purchased anything from Cadence again, and don't intend to.

If enough of us refuse to buy software, music, or movies from companies that deliberately frustrate their paying customers, then they will either change their strategy or they will deservedly go out of business.

Re:Nothing new under the sun

[danbert8]

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.

Re:Nothing new under the sun

[morgan_greywolf]

If enough of us refuse to buy software, music, or movies from companies that deliberately frustrate their paying customers, then they will either change their strategy or they will deservedly go out of business. Well, this doesn't really apply in markets where there is a monopolist running things. MSFT can do things like this and get away with it precisely because they own more than 90% of the desktop OS market. Your only other choice is to run an alternative platform, like Mac OS X or Linux, neither of which are particularly good platforms from a gamer's perspective.

IOW, the fact that Microsoft gets away with 'forced upgrades' and the like is all the proof you need that they should have been broken up following the DOJ anti-trust trial, per the orders of Judge Jackson.

Re:Nothing new under the sun

[bigbigbison]

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.

Re:Nothing new under the sun

[Sparr0]

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.

Re:Nothing new under the sun

[MightyMartian]

My feeling is that where requiring an upgrade of the operating system is nothing more than if(version="VISTA","Welcome","You're FUcked") then the companies should be charged with false advertising and fined millions.

Re:Nothing new under the sun

[suv4x4]

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.

Re:Nothing new under the sun

[robbiethefett]

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?

Re:Nothing new under the sun

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nothing new under the sun

[Spudds]

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.

this is trivial

[Kuciwalker]

All you do is remove the OS check in the exe. It's no more difficult than a no-cd. And because of that, it won't be possible for any DX10-only games.

(And as I understand it, you can't just port DX10 to XP - its functionality requires the new display driver model in Vista.)

Re:Way to go Falling Leaf...

[Tridus]

This wasn't Falling Leaf, it was the crack group Razor 1911.

Falling Leaf hasn't released anything.

Re:Way to go Falling Leaf...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a link to their... umm... press release

Re:Way to go Falling Leaf...

[Drachemorder]

If you don't want to respect their license, that's fine, but then you shouldn't expect them to respect the GPL either.

There's an inherent difference here. Microsoft's licenses try to restrict you from doing things you would otherwise have the right to do. The GPL gives you rights to do things that you would not otherwise have. If you don't want to respect the GPL, that's fine, but you'd essentially be a software pirate if you distribute GPL software in violation of its terms. On the flip side, if you violate some of Microsoft's license terms, you might not have done anything illegal at all (running Vista in a VM, for instance). So I really do see a huge difference between the two licensing models, and therefore a difference between the nature of respect for them.

Re:Where's The Justice Department?

[dannannan]

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.

Re:Bah

[Laur]

What this means is that it will always be slower than DX10 on Vista...Another problem is the increased overhead, so you'll need to spend much more on hardware to get a similar experience that a slower system gets in Vista.

You make this assertion with absolutely no proof to back it up. If you haven't noticed, generally speaking Vista is noticeably slower than XP at doing the same tasks (surely you've heard of the differences in their hardware requirements?). Therefore, it is by no means certain that XP + some performance overhead will be slower than Vista with it's already increased performance overhead.

and that it will be dependent on the quality of OpenGL drivers on WinXP.

These are provided by the card manufacturers, and from what I know are excellent.

Then there's the question if OpenGL even has anything comparable to geometry shaders yet

They do.

Even if you wanted to solve this by throwing more powerful hardware in your rig, it would only be possible for a year or so, as NVIDIA/AMD will not be interested in providing driver support for XP in future GPUs.

XP has been around for six years, and has a massive installed base. Furthermore, the shift to Vista is not happening at all quickly. XP support will be around for a good long while. From what I've heard, Vista is the one with driver issues.

Age of Empires III's false XP requirement

[lymeca]

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.