Preview of DirectX 10 compatibility libraries

Apr 26, 2007 14:00 GMT  ·  By

There is one word that comes across every player's mind when it comes to games, the DirectX word. We all know about the DirectX update installations which prompt almost once with any serious game set-up. Once with the release of Microsoft Windows Vista a new DirectX release came into our world: the DirectX 10.

Unfortunately, DirectX 10 is offered only together with Windows Vista, as, according to Microsoft, there were significant changes compared to the previous Windows graphics architecture and a new element, the so-called Windows Display Driver Model, has been introduced. Unfortunately again, this also implies that a DX10 executable game cannot be run on a non-Vista platform.

The good news will be that there were some people who thought about it and started developing a solution to this problem. The Falling Leaf Systems started working on some libraries able to modify a DX10 executable game into a version that can be run on Windows XP, Linux or even OS X. Their goal seems marvelous and I am sure this involves a lot of hard coding and so far they've released just a preview of the DirectX 10 compatibility libraries. The libraries were gathered under the Alky Project name. This preview allows the run of some examples from the DirectX SDK on Windows XP, for now; there is still a lot of work until popular games will be able to run on Mac OSX or Linux.

To support the Alky Project one can donate $ 50 and get access to development builds and other benefits through the Sapling Program, launched by the Falling Leaf Systems.