[B3D News]

Microsoft wants gamers running its new OS as soon as possible. One of the incentive MS pushed to seduce the gaming crowd, other than bringing its fee-based Live online community platform to Vista, was to propose DirectX 10-only, and thus Vista-only, titles. Without any DX10 title around, MS opted for locking the PC ports of Halo 2 (Xbox) and Shadowrun (Xbox 360) to the Vista platform. It was thus impossible to start and play these games on a Windows XP Until some hackers had their words to say about that.

Read the full news item

[Asher]

I believe there are inaccuracies in this report:

The group's name was Razor911, not "warez".
This doesn't allow DX10-only games to run on Vista, just DX9 games "locked" to Windows XP.

[Zaphod]

So, not all that dissimilar from the patches & loaders released to allow MS-published games from the last year or two to run just dandy on Win2K.

[Geo]

Originally Posted by Asher

This doesn't allow DX10-only games to run on Vista, just DX9 games "locked" to Windows XP.

I don't believe the report says that. The key sentence being "Without any DX10 title around, MS opted for locking the PC ports of Halo 2 (Xbox) and Shadowrun (Xbox 360) to the Vista platform," which clearly makes a distinction between DX10 and Vista.

The problem is, I think this episode is going to foster the notion amongst less technical gamers that *any* Vista-only game can be haxxored to run on XP, and that is just not going to be true at some point down the line. It may be quite someways down the line, however. . .

[Zaphod]

Originally Posted by Geo

I don't believe the report says that. The key sentence being "Without any DX10 title around, MS opted for locking the PC ports of Halo 2 (Xbox) and Shadowrun (Xbox 360) to the Vista platform," which clearly makes a distinction between DX10 and Vista.

Well, the headline says used to say: "Vista and DirectX 10-only titles cracked to run on Windows XP".

[Farid]

Originally Posted by Zaphod

Well, the headline says: "Vista and DirectX 10-only titles cracked to run on Windows XP".

No it doesn't.



We changed the title since it didn't make clear that DirectX 10 ≠ Direct3D 10, so we opted not to nurture any confusion about it.

And Asher, at first I decided not to publish the exact name of the group before asking Rys if it was cool with him or not. Now that he's online and cool with it, I changed it.

[zed]

speaking of halo2 did anyone see its sales figures yet, no wonder ms have kept quiet about its release unlike when it was anounced a year ago
uk pc sales
1st week 5th place
2nd week 11th place
3rd week drops out of the top20

i knew it would tank, but nowhere near this bad, true its an old game (but so were gta3 etc)

vista only titles, a good idea?

[Demirug]

From what I see these games make use of a new Vista only API for sounds and video. AFAIK it’s the low latency interface. Therefore there is a real technical reason why the games do not work on Windows XP. Theses “patches” seems to redirect calls to the new API somewhere else. I am not sure about the overall impact of these step.

Anyway it shows that Direct3D 10 is not the only Vista API that can be used by games.

[AlStrong]

Originally Posted by Demirug

From what I see these games make use of a new Vista only API for sounds and video. AFAIK it’s the low latency interface. Therefore there is a real technical reason why the games do not work on Windows XP. Theses “patches” seems to redirect calls to the new API somewhere else. I am not sure about the overall impact of these step.

Anyway it shows that Direct3D 10 is not the only Vista API that can be used by games.

That's interesting, I never really considered that aspect even though it should have been obvious (given the whole issue surrounding EAX & Creative).

Would you say the audio system ( the low-latency part you mention) is somewhat resembling of the Xbox's audio setup? Like... given how the Xbox is a fixed platform with more to-the-metal programming hence "low-latency". (Did that make sense?)

[hesido]

I literally hate this strategy of Microsoft. Alan Wake has been in development for years and it was developed in directX9 AFAIK, but it seems they are now making it directX10/vista only. I am sure they will be making use of new DirectX10 features but all the beautiful screenshots I saw were probably DirectX9. DirectX9 is still very capable of producing outstanding graphics, something that needs no iteration on these forums.

It is like saying you can't play Alan Wake to the pc crowd.

MS will be using these titles to leverage Vista sales and will not be making profit, but I think they hope to make profits from the Xbox sales. This is simply a cheap marketing tactic.

[Asher]

Originally Posted by AlStrong

That's interesting, I never really considered that aspect even though it should have been obvious (given the whole issue surrounding EAX & Creative).

Would you say the audio system ( the low-latency part you mention) is somewhat resembling of the Xbox's audio setup? Like... given how the Xbox is a fixed platform with more to-the-metal programming hence "low-latency". (Did that make sense?)

The new audio is supposed to be heavily inspired by the Xbox's audio.