November 06, 2008 by
Jason
The Games for Windows Branding tool is one of the evolved aspects of the DirectX software development kit launched on November 5, 2008 for a variety of Windows releases, including Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows XP Service Pack 3.
The November 2008 DirectX SDK delivers the Runtime, along with the additional software (updates to tools, utilities, samples, documentation, and runtime debug files) set up to enable developers to create content compliant with DirectX. Both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows are covered by the DirectX SDK update.
The November 2008 DirectX SDK has taken the Games for Windows Branding tool (offered initially in the August 2008 release of the SDK) to the next level. “This tool helps developers and publishers test their compliance against the Games for Windows technical requirements and test requirements,” revealed Microsoft. Read More»
Posted in Windows XP, windows vista | No Comments »
October 14, 2008 by
Jason The pain…
If you’ve invested your hard earned cash on a Creative X-FI sound card and a copy of Vista, you may be feeling a bit underwhelmed right now. Some of your games may be sounding a bit flat and lifeless and you’ll have no doubt felt that sinking feeling when you edit the sound settings in your new game only to find that you can’t enable some of the fancy options. There is a good reason for this and you probably will have been told at great length about it by one of the many passengers on the anti-Microsoft bandwagon.
The Science…
If you’re an experienced PC gamer you’ll no doubt be aware of DirectX and the various functions that make up the DirectX standard, such as DirectDraw, Direct3d and DirectSound and DirectSound3D. You will probably be aware of the hype surrounding Direct3d already, given that it has now reached version 10, but that’s a story for another day. DirectSound is what we are interested in here and it is sadly missing in Vista. XP and DirectX9 featured a “Hardware Abstraction Layer” which was a piece of software that allowed Windows to talk directly to a soundcard such as the X-FI to provide hardware mixing and 3d effects for your games. Without this layer any sound you hear will be mixed using software, rendering much of your shiny new soundcard useless. Read More»
Posted in windows vista | 1 Comment »
I’ve recently written an essay that discusses the impact Windows Vista will have on semiconductor suppliers to the PC ecosystem; both in PCs themselves and in tethered peripherals and LAN peers. When it’s published, I’ll give you a heads-up here in this blog, and I’ll welcome your feedback.
However, in the process of researching it, I collected an assortment of Vista suggestions that I thought you might find useful nearer-term. First off, however, a welcome update. Back in October of 2005, I alerted you to Microsoft’s then-plan to offer a degraded OpenGL graphics API experience under Windows Vista. Read More»
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