There, That Wasn't So Hard, Was It? Vista-Only Games For WinXP

[Lemur]

A company called Falling Leaf Systems will be selling "Compatability Libraries" that allow Vista-only titles such as Shadowrun and Halo 2 to run on Windows XP.

Apparently there are legitimate technical hurdles to offering DX10 titles on XP, although the lemur is very skeptical about how hard those would be to overcome. But releasing DX9 titles as Vista-only sounds an awful lot like product tying, an illegal practice in every business.

[drone]

My understanding of the Shadowrun/Halo2 fix was that it removes or fakes out a OS check. They are both DX9 games, this is strictly M$ trying to "encourage" people to upgrade.

I've got mixed feelings about this. A friend of mine bought both, and plans on playing them on XP, "just because he can". On the other hand, buying these games encourages M$ and other companies to try this on more games. I would think crushingly low sales of games that try to pull this crap would send a crystal clear message.

For the DX10 stuff, I had heard they were going to write wrappers that use OpenGL to get things running on XP. OpenGL already supports SM4.0, so it shouldn't be that hard.

[Whacker]

My understanding of the Shadowrun/Halo2 fix was that it removes or fakes out a OS check. They are both DX9 games, this is strictly M$ trying to "encourage" people to upgrade.

Sounds like DMCA bait to me.

I've got mixed feelings about this. A friend of mine bought both, and plans on playing them on XP, "just because he can". On the other hand, buying these games encourages M$ and other companies to try this on more games. I would think crushingly low sales of games that try to pull this crap would send a crystal clear message.

Agree completely, but this is MS we are dealing with. We forget how big their war chest of pure cash is, and the lengths they are willing to go to corner/dominate a market. Look at the losses they were taking on the Xbrick for years. The fact that they are using this gaming bit as 'incentive' to switch to Vista is just more of the same in my view, they are probably willing/prepared to take losses and wait it out. Lame, but I bet it'll end up working, sadly enough.

[Husar]

Well, in three years they want to release the next OS and that will be 64bit only. I'm starting to hope they won't make that compatible with 32 bit programs so companies are forced to migrate already(I'd dual-boot again of course for older programs).

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Are there any Vista-only games besides Halo 2 and Shadowrun? Neither of those are very interesting to me.

I did find one, actually. The demo (and presumably the full game) for Geometry Wars for PC is Vista-only, but I wasn't going to buy that either.

[sapi]

afaik, halo 2 is only vista only out of MS' choice - it doesn't use dx10 so there's no reason to lock it to vista.

Because of that, you won't see true vista-only (dx10) games for a couple of years.