Lawsuits might be pointed the other way

Posted Mar 30, 2008 22:59 UTC (Sun) by dark (guest, #8483)
Parent article: A creative example of the value of free drivers

When Creative sold these cards, did they advertise the features that they have now disabled on Vista? The customers might have grounds for a lawsuit on that point. Creative could try to argue that the cards were sold as compatible only with XP and not with Vista, but I don't think that will be very convincing now that they have admitted that crippling the cards was a deliberate decision.

Lawsuits might be pointed the other way

Posted Mar 31, 2008 6:42 UTC (Mon) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link] (2 responses)

I doubt it.  A "business decision" does not legally negate that the features were advertised
to work with XP.

Lawsuits might be pointed the other way

Posted Mar 31, 2008 9:39 UTC (Mon) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] (1 responses)

I wouldn't be surprised if they just advertised the features and listed "minimum system
requirements".  I doubt they'd advertise a card as supporting exactly one version of Windows.

Lawsuits might be pointed the other way

Posted Mar 31, 2008 11:21 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I doubt they'd advertise a card as supporting exactly one version of Windows.

Why not? How is it different from supporting exactly one OS?

Lawsuits might be pointed the other way

Posted Mar 31, 2008 9:10 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Microsoft made substantial changes to the Vista audio API, both in in terms of application API
and in terms of driver API. Plus they added additional restrictions on hardware manufacturers
in terms of things like signed binaries and DRM support.

Microsoft calls their new audio stuff 'Wave RT'

Ostensively Microsoft made these changes to bring improvements to it's system in terms of
media playback capabilities. Lower latency, better multichannel support, better syncing, lower
resource usage, and that sort of stuff. As well as making their OS more DRM friendly to
support a potential equivalent of 'iTunes for Video'.

This is a big bone of contention between Creative and Microsoft. As a side effect of all of
this Microsoft decided to eliminated the kernel's ability to use hardware to accelerate it's
DirectSound 3D. So Creative is trying to get people to use OpenAL so that they can do their
own drivers for Vista that enable hardware acceleration.

The whole market around Creative stemmed from the fact it was the 'Gamers' card. It was the
only card you could get that had full acceleration and supported all the audio features for
games. It was never the cheapest, and there were cards priced less that were better for audio
editing, but only Creative supported EAX. (and Creative used it's extensive software patent
portfolio to force game makers to support EAX and advertise support for it in their games.)

(personally I think this sort of EAX thing is mostly pointless on modern hardware, especially
hardware with multicore cpus. The 'HDA' standard for onboard sound is probably just as good
when combined with software 3D proccessing as Creative's expensive hardware)

http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?boa...

"Creative ALchemy - DirectSound 3D is now possible in Vista!"
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=7719

"John Carmack: "This sucks.""
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20040728-4048.html

This dispute with the modder is probably a combination of him asking for money for Creative's
software, some exec's getting all offended that he is violating the EULA, and him disrupting
Creative's attempts to influence the future direction on game design and irritating Microsoft.

It's kinda difficult for Creative to try to get the gaming community irritated at Microsoft
for getting rid of their HAL for DirectSound3D when you have some joker coming around and
hacking 'fixes' into binaries.