The Alky Project

2007-04-23 Thread Ian Macfarlane

The Inquirer has an interesting article about something called the
Alky Project which claims to have initial support for DirectX 10 on
Windows XP (and possibly other operating systems).

The Inquirer article is here (it links to a number of bits of info
about the project):

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39095

They've released some sample DirectX 10 DLL files here:

http://fallingleafsystems.com/site_media/preview.zip

which they claim support at least one of the DirectX 10 demos fairly
well (there's a readme in the zip, which is small, only 824k).

I see that some person with an interest in WINE has already asked
about this, to make sure they're not ripping off WINE, and they've
responded with some details (including a bit of code) here:

http://www.fallingleafsystems.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=12

Just posting this in case any developers haven't seen this yet and
would like to know about it - sorry if it's just repeating stuff you
already know, but I couldn't find anything in wine.devel about it.

Best wishes

Ian Macfarlane
(I'm not affiliated with any of the stuff mentioned in this email)




Re: The Alky Project

2007-04-23 Thread H. Verbeet

On 23/04/07, Ian Macfarlane [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

The Inquirer has an interesting article about something called the
Alky Project which claims to have initial support for DirectX 10 on
Windows XP (and possibly other operating systems).


My impression is that the Alky project severely underestimates the
amount of work involved in making this work right.




Re: The Alky Project

2007-04-23 Thread Stefan Dösinger
Am Montag 23 April 2007 17:32 schrieb H. Verbeet:
 On 23/04/07, Ian Macfarlane [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  The Inquirer has an interesting article about something called the
  Alky Project which claims to have initial support for DirectX 10 on
  Windows XP (and possibly other operating systems).

 My impression is that the Alky project severely underestimates the
 amount of work involved in making this work right.
Actually, they tend to announce something to generate some buzz, put 
themselves on slashdot and other pages to get a few people shell out the $50 
for their sapling program, only to stop the whole thing with some excuse a 
few months later.

First, they started as an open source project to convert Win32 PE binaries 
to Linux ELF and MacOS binaries, and a set of libraries to give the code the 
APIs it needs. Some day the project just vanished.

A little bit later on it came back as a closed source project which promised 
to convert the prey demo, which uses OpenGL and doesn't need much fixup for 
the api.

Later on they announced that they'd work on new d3d apps like TES:Oblivion, 
etc. Eventually they ditched that for working on converting d3d10 apps.

Now they came around with their d3d10 lib for winxp. From a quick look at the 
strings in the lib, they use opengl, but import only very, very basic 
functions like glBegin, glVertex, glTexImage. No shader things, no 
multitexturing, no vertex / index buffer things. With their function they can 
only have a software renderer(which won't run any real game), or its just a 
hello world d3d10 implementation which doesn't do much more than return 
D3D_OK on CreateDeviceAndSwapchain(which would fit the few success/failure 
reports I saw).


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