The guys at The Inquirer have spotted a rather interesting blog post by a 19-year-old "software reverse-engineer" who claims to have developed a set of compatibility libraries that allow Windows XP users to run games coded for Microsoft's new DirectX 10 set of application programming interfaces. DirectX 10 is built into Windows Vista, and the Direct3D 10 component's reliance on Vista's Windows Display Driver Model makes it a Vista exclusive. However, the young San Diego-based hacker says the "Alky Project" libraries "allow the use of DirectX 10 games on platforms other than Microsoft Vista . . . by compiling Geometry Shaders down to native machine code for execution where hardware isn't capable of running it."
A pre-release version of the compatibility libraries can be downloaded from the hacker's blog here. To install the libraries, users must copy seven DLL files to the System32 subdirectory in their Windows directory. Naturally, we recommend that users try this on a spare machine—if they must try it at all. The hacker says the libraries already allows one to run "a number of examples" from Microsoft's DirectX 10 developer toolkit on Windows XP, though.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39095
http://alkyproject.blogspot.com/
A pre-release version of the compatibility libraries can be downloaded from the hacker's blog here. To install the libraries, users must copy seven DLL files to the System32 subdirectory in their Windows directory. Naturally, we recommend that users try this on a spare machine—if they must try it at all. The hacker says the libraries already allows one to run "a number of examples" from Microsoft's DirectX 10 developer toolkit on Windows XP, though.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39095
http://alkyproject.blogspot.com/
