Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Groxx 5547 days ago
I don't blame them for trying to kill it off. Truly. It's been long enough, especially now that 7 is actually a solid upgrade for nearly every use.

But I do blame them for all the under-handed, customer-spiteful tactics they've used. DirectX 10 on Vista only, though it's almost 100% compatible with DX9 (having 9 report version 10 allows many DX10 games to run). IE9+ on Vista/7 only. It's complete bullshit, through and through, and I see no reason to defend their methods.
2 comments
daeken 5546 days ago
> (having 9 report version 10 allows many DX10 games to run

The only games with which this will work is games that support DX9 explicitly and, for some reason, disable it. The D3D9 and 10 APIs are completely different. Having worked on an implementation of DX10 for XP, I can say for sure that this is 100% incorrect.

link
Groxx 5546 days ago
/me hunts around

Aaah, I see where I got that from. Early speculation on Crysis. Apologies!

Know how well the Alky project managed to get DX10 on XP working? I just found it now.

link
daeken 5546 days ago
That was my project, and not very well haha. It worked, if you consider a lack of shaders, lighting (IIRC), and other critical things to be "working". Shaders were a PITA for a few reasons, not the least of which being that the D3D10 shader bytecode was completely undocumented. Spent a couple months doing nothing but reversing the bytecode format, and things sort of fell apart after that. All the code's out there, though, as is the complete story of the project and the company around it: http://daeken.com/alky-postmortem
link
Groxx 5546 days ago
Hah, what a find :D I'll be happy to read it.

I'm not entirely convinced mimicking anything Microsoft puts out is a good idea, even under the best circumstances. I've lately been getting pretty far into .NET, and the more I see, the more it terrifies me.

link
experimental 5546 days ago
I'm on the fence with them supporting XP. One comparison to take into account is Safari's releases have dropped support for an older OS, much less than 10 years, they did change processor architecture though and have less business users to support. Also Microsoft offer free support.
link