Vista Games Cracked to Run on XP 376
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.
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:5, Informative)
This brings up an interesting question of if this hack works with XP x64.
Re:Where's The Justice Department? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Way to go Falling Leaf... (Score:5, Informative)
Falling Leaf hasn't released anything.
Re:Where's The Justice Department? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:this is trivial (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Console Emulators (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Randomly slower (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Where's The Justice Department? (Score:1, Informative)
And as someone else already pointed out, the rules change when you're a monopoly. Especially a criminal one.
Re:Way to go Falling Leaf... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about legal issues? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:this is trivial (Score:3, Informative)
WWN Issue #325 [winehq.org]:
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about Linux? (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:Way to go Falling Leaf... (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Where's The Justice Department? (Score:5, Informative)
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:Nothing new under the sun (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:3, Informative)
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?"
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:2, Informative)
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/ [opengl.org]. 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.
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Way to go Falling Leaf... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Why not OpenGL? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Way to go Falling Leaf... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How about XP only games on 2000? (Score:3, Informative)
For Supreme Commander you can use my handy-dandy patch [gaspowered.com].
RegardselFarto
Re:Why not OpenGL? (Score:3, Informative)
MS, SGi, and HP designed a standard called Fahrenheit [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:Way to go Falling Leaf... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:2, Informative)
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.