DirectX 10 for Windows XP

[Guest DILDOMASTER666]

What a fine way to kick Microsoft in the balls. A project named "The Alky Project" (now defunct) aimed to provide Windows XP users with the equivalent of the brutality of DirectX10 which was the main reason for getting Windows Vista. Unfortunately, the project has long since officially retired, but they did leave behind the source for the Alky Project and an alpha release of their modules, which apparently runs a few games (but it's a very incomplete library).

ORIGINAL SOURCE: TechMixer
Alky Project Homepage?

Maybe someone could find a cool use for this.

In before timeline.

[chungy]

Meh

There's always some talk between Wine developers about a real usable version of Wine for Windows (not just the test suite version they already have), to resolve the backward and forward incompatibilities inherit to practically every version. I'm not sure how exactly DirectX would be pulled off; most Windows users don't have recent OpenGL implementations unless their video card drivers came with them (you don't really expect to convert DirectX 10 calls into DirectX 9 perfectly, do you?).

Would be useful for various reasons. Run Windows 9x games on Win 2000/XP/Vista, especially if there's some real technical reason for them not running (the "compatibility mode" is nothing more than pretending you have a different version of Windows), or run recent Adobe bloatware on Windows 2000 (Photoshop CS2 refuses to install on Win2k, for example).

[Csonicgo]

if that's GPL you can bet your ass that WINE will use this.


*checks*

It IS. :D


but yeah..... DX10 for XP is impossible. Sorry.

[Maes]

The ultimate way to "kick Microsoft in the balls" and make the whole Vista/DX10 clay giant crumble, would be for a "killer app" to appear, and that killer app to be nothing short of "John Romero's Daikatana: DX10", promoted with the slogan "John Romero is about to make DX10 (also) his bitch, suck it down (too)".

A match made in hell: a game that never managed to be what it hoped to be, and a graphics/gaming library that has yet to prove that it's really necessary...better than something....better than nothing...?

[Lüt]

Csonicgo said:

but yeah..... DX10 for XP is impossible. Sorry.

Just out of curiousity, what's the specific reasoning behind this?

[Guest DILDOMASTER666]

Probably some Microsoft douchebaggery about delimiting access to the graphics card differently in XP, or what have you, I imagine. I see no reason why improving compatibility with existing Vista-native X10 apps on Vista is a bad thing anyway, though.

[chungy]

Because it's CSonicGo and he doesn't need any research/facts/evidence before posting crap.

[GooberMan]

Csonicgo said:

but yeah..... DX10 for XP is impossible. Sorry.

Are you kidding me? They had DX10 running on XP for years while it was in development. Hell, I think I've still got a preview SDK on my computer somewhere.

[Zaldron]

GooberMan said:

Are you kidding me? They had DX10 running on XP for years while it was in development. Hell, I think I've still got a preview SDK on my computer somewhere.

To be fair how to tackle this problem? The fancy-pants new driver architecture is not present in XP, and it seems to be 'new' and convoluted enough for the two most prominent graphic hardware manufacturers to scratch their heads a while. Then you have to somehow port something what is essentially closed source coded under an API you don't have.

I lack sufficient details on how complex the underworks of these drivers are, or wether a superset of DX9 is all that's needed.

[Csonicgo]

MikeRS said:

Because it's CSonicGo and he doesn't need any research/facts/evidence before posting crap.

Heh

Actually this time I *did* look things up, and the problems are numerous. The biggest one that comes to mind is "Shaders". Due to the weirdness of compiled forms of the Direct3DD HW shaders, It's not going to be easy to implement them. I hope someone proves me wrong.

Perhaps if the shader language is reverse-engineered correctly, A conversion to a low-level language for speed would be possible.

I don't even want to know how a team will implement the DX10 features such as procedural textures and geometery shaders ( I'm not sure how DX does this, but I'll bet it's similar to GLSL) and other quirks that DX has that has been exploited throughout the years.

Then again, Perseverance is something I know well and maybe someone with enough of it can figure all this out soon. :[

[skadoomer]

GooberMan said:

Are you kidding me? They had DX10 running on XP for years while it was in development. Hell, I think I've still got a preview SDK on my computer somewhere.

They have to give the people some reason for upgrading to vista.

[chungy]

OpenGL already supported all the DirectX 10 stuff before DirectX 10 was even released. So long as you have an up-to-date implementation (not as common as you'd hope), you can have "DirectX 10" style games on Windows XP now, with no compatibility layers or some shit.

[GooberMan]

Csonicgo said:

procedural textures

Can be done quite easily with earlier shader models.

Csonicgo said:

geometery shaders

As you and other people have noted, there's a GL extension for them. DX10 requires hardware support for them however.

Zaldron said:

To be fair how to tackle this problem?

You're effectively replacing the DirectX10 API. Who cares how the original implementation interacted with the drivers as long as the functionality is there?