Many users of XP, including my son, have believed that the upgrade to Vista was going to be a necessity, as the news from Redmond was that new games would be released requiring DirectX 10, the Microsoft advanced screen drawing application programming interface, and therefore, Vista.

Microsoft continues to put forth the message that DirectX 10 will never be available for Windows XP, and that the reasons, while not really explained in full detail, are that it is impossible to do such an implementation.

After saying that, Microsoft stated that many games would now never be available to users of XP, whether they used DirectX 10 functions or not. It was then answered explicitly that some DirectX 9 games would never be available for XP, the reason not clear, except that Microsoft had declared it to be so.

In response to the edicts from Microsoft many hackers vowed that these games would, after a time, be successfully made to work on Windows XP. Falling Leaf Systems, founded in 2006, was formed to provide solutions to this type of problem. In May of this year, a statement was issued by Falling Leaf that it would make both Halo 2 and Shadowrun work on XP.

Now, release of the news that Falling Leaf has been beaten to the goal by a hacking group named Warez. Yesterday, a patch was announced that allows both Halo 2 and Shadowrun to run on an XP system with DirectX 9.

The patch released allows play of the games on XP, but still to be worked out is the online play capabilities, which both Warez and Falling Leaf Systems believe will be available soon.

This is sure to bring the ire of the Redmond giant, and it remains to be seen what steps Microsoft will take to quash this attempt to subvert the forced upgrade to Vista.

This will certainly become a test of will for the players, and an exciting watch for consumers.

Tags: microsoft, directx 10, directx 9, windows vista, windows xp, falling leaf systems, warez, halo 2, shadowrun, forced upgrade