- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
It's not often I get to quote myself, but...
Posted by: Captiosus
That's a third party solution that will cost money, neither endorsed nor supported by Microsoft - it's not like "oh just download the patch".
The bigger question is: How long do you think it will exist before Microsoft and their massive legal team shuts it down for copyright infringement? I'm not a betting man but even I'd put money down that Microsoft will stop Falling Leaf Systems from releasing their compatibility software before it even becomes publicly available.
I mean.. Microsoft has been actively trying to shut down TransGaming's Cedega for a while. Unlike Cedega, this is actually someone "reverse engineering" (read: cracking), by their own admission, DX10 to make a compatible D3D Windows XP version. Not so sure how well that will fly.
And, they seem to have a lot of questions surrounding their validity. Take, for instance, this discussion from April from the WINE mailing list:
Am Montag 23 April 2007 17:32 schrieb H. Verbeet:
> On 23/04/07, Ian Macfarlane <ianmacfarlane at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The Inquirer has an interesting article about something called the Alky Project which claims to have initial support for DirectX 10 onWindows XP (and >> possibly other operating systems).
>
> My impression is that the Alky project severely underestimates the amount of work involved in making this work right.
Actually, they tend to announce something to generate some buzz, put themselves on slashdot and other pages to get a few people shell out the $50 for their "sapling" program, only to stop the whole thing with some excuse a few months later.
First, they started as an open source project to "convert" Win32 PE binaries to Linux ELF and MacOS binaries, and a set of libraries to give the code the APIs it needs. Some day the project just vanished.
A little bit later on it came back as a closed source project which promised to convert the prey demo, which uses OpenGL and doesn't need much fixup for the api.
Later on they announced that they'd work on new d3d apps like TES:Oblivion, etc. Eventually they ditched that for working on converting d3d10 apps.
Now they came around with their d3d10 lib for winxp. From a quick look at the strings in the lib, they use opengl, but import only very, very basic functions like glBegin, glVertex, glTexImage. No shader things, no multitexturing, no vertex / index buffer things. With their function they can only have a software renderer(which won't run any real game), or its just a hello world d3d10 implementation which doesn't do much more than return D3D_OK on CreateDeviceAndSwapchain (which would fit the few success/failure reports I saw).
I know that's a lot of technobabble, but, put simply, Falling Leaf Systems kept promising the world to Linux users for D3D9 (DX9 compliant) and never delivered. The Alky project still exists, but is pretty much dead, after months of work and promises. Now they're promising to come out with a DX10-compatable D3D10 library that will run on XP in only a few months?