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:Where's The Justice Department? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Way to go Falling Leaf... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:DirectX 9 Only (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Way to go Falling Leaf... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Console Emulators (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Way to go Falling Leaf... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not OpenGL? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why not OpenGL? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:1, Interesting)
Given that the installed Linux base is larger than OSX and Vista put together, you can be absolutely confident that (1) is being dictated by politics and not market share. In the particular case you mentioned, I suspect that you ran into a fanboi. Most programmers prefer to work with stable platforms. It is just a lot easier to develop working code if you aren't also trying to "keep pace" with a moving API. It also means that you can focus on the interesting problems (like making your AI smarter) over the trivial (figuring out the technique-du-jour for painting a bush). On the other hand, if you are lazy and not too bright, there might be a career in constantly relearning how to paint bushes.
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why not OpenGL? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:2, Interesting)
Age of Empires III's false XP requirement (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Way to go Falling Leaf... (Score:1, Interesting)
Greetz to all the other groups who are fighting for freedom on the last battlefield.