After reading the comments on that blog I'm highly suspect of it. Porting some simpler DX10 calls to DX9 while totally ignoring others isn't what looks like proper DX10 support for XP. They may have more success on x64 XP, who knows? I wish them all the best.

I think I heard that the Wine people were going to tackle this, even offering a wrapper for the windows folks. Not sure what the latest status of it is though.

Interesting. I do not plan to move to Vista.

meh Vista. I haven't bought a copy of Windows since Winders 98. Been using work copies of Windows ever since.

If it were down to money though I definetly wouldn't waste money on Vista unless I was like everyone else and bought my PC's instead of building them (Bought my new 24" monitor last week and some speakers today!! woohoo!) and then pay the Windows Tax. Sad thing about Vista is that EAX is just FUBAR, and that Alchemy wrapper is a POS. I expect serious gamers to be using XP for a long time if they care anything at all about sound quality.

Game compatibility doesn't seem too bad. Check out my PC Game Compatibility list for Vista. Yeah, the # of non-working games is pretty high right now but I'm whittling it down.

My personal recommendations if you plan on using Vista:

1. 1GB memory MINIMUM. 1.5+GB to be comfortable. Vista isn't that bad at eating up memory but it is worse than XP, just like any previous Windows release the memory requirements do go up. The reason why we need more memory though is that games are actually using more than 1gb nowadays. Stop whining people. I've had 1gb of memory in my home computer since 2001.

2. Dual-Processors/Dual-Cores Minimum
I've been using dual processors since PPro's. Last home dual processor computer I had was a dual P3-1ghz on an Abit VP6 back in 2001. When I "upgraded' to an Athlon Processor in 2002 I saw an extremly noticeable loss of performance in multitasking. It was annoying but I got over it. Nowadays with all of the bloat and with games finally taking advantage of dual processors/cores, it's a must. (Hyperthreading does not count and it never did).

3. Sound Cards
If you want hardware accelerated audio then you'll need a sound card that supports OPENAL. AFAIK, Creative is the only sound card company that fully supports OPENAL. To add insult to injury no card other than Creative's X-FI can play old games with EAX under Vista and even then you have to use an DirectSound->OPENAL Wrapper! (Alchemy).

For now I'd just dual-boot with XP for old EAX/DirectSound games that do not support OPENAL.

4. CRT Monitor's - I do not know if this is common behavior for all CRT monitors in Vista but every time that UAC prompt popped up in Vista my CRT monitor would act like it was switching resolution. Highly annoying. My guess is that it's yet another MS conspiracy to get people to upgrade. 🙄 It doesn't do this on any LCD monitor that I have seen. UAC is still annoying even on an LCD monitor however. I still have my CRT setup up (and intend to until it finally dies) so mabye I can figure out how to fix this issue.

Anyways for the average person nowadays a 21-22" LCD is pretty cheap and a good buy.

The last part is a driver issue - it's almost exactly the same behaviour as the Nvidia control panel sometimes displays when right clicking on your desktop and launching it from there. It looks like the resolution has been reset but really it's just the registers on the GPU being refreshed. This doesn't happen all the time or with every Nvidia driver but I've certainly seen such behaviour before. I think I even remember seeing it happen on some other vendors graphics cards from time to time too.

Ah, here it is: http://www.winehq.com/?issue=325#DirectX%2010%20For%20SoC?

Key point:

Devs need:
Vista OS.
DX10 games. (not just demos).
DX10 Hardware
Person who is willing to work on DX10 code. Current programs have their hands full just working on DX9. (Although they do mention working on DX10 in the future).

So basically it will get done, it's just nowhere near a priority. Pretty much the same status as DX10 in Vista right now since there are no games taking advantage of it.

Found this in the latest Wine newsletter:

Beginning of Direct3D10 implementation by András Kovács, mentored by Stefan Dösinger

Cool.

Reading through that thread they mentioned that C&C 3 ran under Wine on day of release. That's pretty neat....although since it's based on the Generals engine it's not really that suprising.