Creative Vista Driver Modder Speaks Out

hol writes sends a followup on Creative Labs shutting down the modder who made their drivers work with Vista. Wired is running daniel_k's response to the contretemps."

Comments

Except that it's their strategy

[an.echte.trilingue]

Except for that the drivers appear to be broken on purpose. The installer checks to see if it is on Vista, and if so it turns off certain features or replaced working drivers with buggy ones. All he did was disable the checks and replace the Vista drivers with the XP ones. According to TFA, the company has said "that whether or not it cripples its Vista drivers is a 'business decision that only we have the right to make.'"

Looks to me like they are trying to cash in on the Wintel upgrade cycle for no good technical reason: "Oh, if you want to enable all of Vista's advanced features, you need to buy this card over here."

Bastards, but probably bastards who will make lots of money.

Re:Is this real?

[mikael]

Wasn't Creative the company that refused to give ID Software any developer support at the time when ID Software was a startup company. As a result they refused to support Creative in any way whatsoever?

Re:Do NOT buy Creative Sound Cards

[pembo13]

If anyone wants another reason not to buy Creative anymore, two quick ones

• When I bought my Muvo2 years ago, they advertised it as upgradeable to support new codecs -- never happened, can't even get the dumb remote which is required to use the advertised FM radio on the Muvo2
• Creative has decided that having drivers that work for most of their cards in the vanilla Linux kernel is simply too good to be true, so they are moving a binary blob model like Nvidia. God forbid I shouldn't have to go through hoops to get hardware I paid for to work.

Creative retracts forum post.

[Anonymous Coward]

Creative has replaced the original threatening post on the forum with a very defensive one http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=116332 Chunks of the original post are still available on the Wired.com article. Here's a smart guy who archive the original post http://www.woyano.com/view/7839/Archive-of-Creative-Labs-Letter-To-Community-Modder .

Gave up many years ago

[Brit_in_the_USA]

I went through SB live and incompatibilities with very popular VIA chip sets.

I bought a Audigy (1) and never got the firewire port working or any drivers to work since XP SP2.

For years I had been annoyed at the rubbish that installs with the drive CD's and how the GUI is totally at odds with Windows.

I switched to Diamond (with DDL optical output) and Via sound cards (24bit / 96kHz) for a fraction of the price. I haven't looked back, updates are available for vista and they work just fine.

Due to my bad experiences with Creative and driver support I actively steer clear of *any* product they make for over 5 years and advise family and friends to do the same.

Re:Is this real?

[croddy]

Creative won a patent on the algorithm known as Carmack's reverse, which the Doom 3 engine uses extensively. To avoid patent license fees, Id shipped the Doom 3 engine with Creative's EAX shit in it.

see: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20040728-4048.html

Re:Creative alternatives

[citylivin]

I purchased a santa cruz in 2000 or so and up until it was replaced, it had richer fuller sound than any other card I had tried. Previous to that I was using a soudblaster 512 which they discontinued in favour of bringing the EXACT same card to market under the title of "sb live", and costing IIRC double the price. You can see that creative has been pricks for pretty much their entire existence. The main reason to move away from creative is their god awful driver suite. I have never had a turtle beach card or driver crash, period. Not to mention that they dont install a fuckton of TSRs and spew crap all over the system.

Currently I run a turtle beach montego DDL 7.1, and its simply flawless. The only problem I've ever had is getting their cheaper card (riveria) in canada. Its practically the same as the montego, but for half the price (30 bucks) and no 7.1.

Creative have responded...

[Shemmie]

Creative Forum

We have read the strong feedback about Creative's forum post regarding driver development by Daniel_k and other outside parties. Creative's message posted on our behalf by our Company spokesperson tried to address our concern about the improper distribution of certain software which is the property of other companies. However, we did not make it as clear as we would have liked that we do support driver development by independent third parties. The huge task of developing driver updates to accommodate the many changes in the Vista operating system and the extensive testing required, including the lengthy Vista certification requirements for audio, makes it very difficult for Creative to develop updates for all past products. Outside developers have been very helpful to Creative and our customers by developing updates for many of our Sound Blaster products, and we do support and appreciate these efforts. This however does not extend to the unauthorized distribution of other companies' property. We hope to work out a mutually agreeable method for working with Daniel_k in supporting his efforts in driver development. Going forward, we are committed to doing a better job of working more closely with third parties to support their development for our products and our customers.

Re:Is this real? - Umm yes

[Jason Earl]

Because one of the major reasons Linux has driver problems is the refusal of the kernel developer to settle on a stable ABI so companies have something to develop for.

Interestingly enough, Microsoft doesn't offer a stable ABI either. It just releases new versions of its operating system kernel so slowly that it *seems* that there is a stable ABI. The fact that Vista has problems with hardware compatibility is proof of that. What's more, Microsoft's "black box" model is clearly at least partly to blame for Windows' stability problems. As part of the discovery in its Windows Vista class action lawsuit Microsoft was forced to reveal that 30% of Windows crashes in 2007 were the fault of nVidia's drivers.

If you include old but perfectly serviceable hardware that is never likely get a usable Windows Vista driver then a modern Linux distribution almost certainly supports more hardware than Windows Vista, and it does so without having to load questionable black-box drivers. In fact, if it weren't for a few companies that create popular hardware and seem to have an aversion to Free Software (nVidia and Broadcom being the most well known) it would be pretty clear that Linus' insistence on source code has paid off well for Linux users. After all, once a piece of equipment has Free Software drivers these drivers tend to work well with Linux even when new versions come out. Most other hardware manufacturers have basically decided to give the Linux developers what they need. These days you don't even have to be particularly careful in your choice of hardware to get hardware with Free Software Linux drivers. Heck, you can even order a laptop from Dell.

Not that any of this has anything to do with my original point. Hardware compatibility is a real problem for Windows Vista. Tons of perfectly good hardware doesn't work (or work very well) with the operating system. That's a real concern for people with investments in existing hardware. This Creative example is only one of many in which hardware that works perfectly well under Windows XP doesn't work or works poorly with Windows Vista. Microsoft pundits often use similar hardware compatibility problems as a reason to stay away from Linux. However, when Windows Vista has some of the exact same problems it apparently gets a pass.

Re:Is this real? - Umm yes

[xSauronx]

torvalds said it himself:

Clickity

I get asked a lot, which this probably won't surprise you, why doesn't the kernel have a stable device driver ABI?

Linus Torvalds: Well, there's - the lack of an ABI is two-fold: one is we really, really, really don't want one. Every single time people ask for a stable ABI, the main reason for wanting a stable ABI is they want to have their binary drivers and they don't want to give out source and they don't - certainly don't want to merge that source into the stable kernel or the standard kernel.

good article, short read. enjoy

Re:Obvious.

[Macthorpe]

How is this insightful? You clearly didn't read the article at all.

Creative broke parts of their Vista drivers even though those parts would have worked fine. The modder re-enabled them and Creative threw a wobbly. This has nothing to do with DRM or media companies, and the only link to Microsoft is the OS the drivers were written for. It has everything to do with Creative forcing an upgrade path on their customers.

Good work on writing a comment with all the buzzwords necessary to look insightful, though.

Re:Obvious.

[kimvette]

I haven't bought a Creative product since 1999 or 2000, when they were flat-out denying their Live! drivers were buggy and exhibited race conditions . Everyone with a multiprocessor machine and a Live! card could demonstrably reproduce the issues very easily. An OEM had owned up to it and produced an updated driver for their workstation and high-end PC lines, but it wasn't until hyperthreading hit the market that they (creative) finally owned up to it-- because they HAD to. SMP and SMT were going mainstream and they finally realized it. Sorry, after spending >$200 for a sound card that had buggy drivers when a $69 Game Theater XP card (WITH BREAKOUT BOX!) card outperformed it and was STABLE -- I'll still not buy, recommend, specify, or sell Creative products to this day.