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Creative Vista Driver Modder Speaks Out
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Apr 01, 2008 04:38 PM
from the no-good-deed-goes-unpunished dept.
from the no-good-deed-goes-unpunished dept.
hol writes sends a followup on Creative Labs shutting down the modder who made their drivers work with Vista. Wired is running daniel_k's response to the contretemps."
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Hardware: Creative Goes After Driver Modder 385 comments
FreedomFighter writes "Since the release of Windows Vista, Creative has promised their Sound Cards as being 'Vista Ready'. Unfortunately, as many unlucky customers did discover, this is not true. What the users actually found were buggy, feature crippled drivers. Creative insisted that features such as Decoding of Dolby® Digital and DTS(TM) signals and DVD-Audio which worked fine in WinXP, would not work on windows Vista. With Creative releasing less than one new driver a year, things seemed bleak. Fortunately, a talented user, Daniel_K, was recently able to 'fix' many of the drivers, enabling the incompatible features and also fixing many bugs. Just today Creative has decided to put a stop to this. They removed all links to his modified drivers, and banned several users who were posting links to the now banned drivers."
[+]
Creative Backs Down on Vista Driver Debacle 228 comments
In the wake of last week's driver debacle, Creative has finally decided to back down for PR purposes. Modder Daniel_K, author of the offending Vista drivers, has had his posts on the Creative forums reinstated. According to Creative the move was to avoid infringing on other company's IP. "Daniel_K is incensed by Creative. 'They publicly threatened me, just to show their arrogance,' he told El Reg by email. He told us that Creative contacted him on a chat session. 'They were sarcastic, ironic and asked me if I wanted something from them, as if I were expecting something,' he wrote. 'It was my protest against them and would like to see how far it would go.'"
[+]
News: $90 Asus Sound Card Whips Creative's Best 387 comments
EconolineCrush writes "Sound card giant Creative caught plenty of flak for its recent driver debacle, and has long been criticized for bullying competitors and stifling innovation. But few have been willing to compete with Creative head-on, allowing the company to milk its X-Fi audio processor for more than two and a half years. Now the SoundBlaster has a new challenger in the form of Asus' $90 Xonar DX, which delivers much better sound quality than the X-Fi, PCI Express connectivity, and support for real-time Dolby Digital Live encoding. The Xonar can even emulate the latest EAX positional audio effects, providing the most complete competition to the X-Fi available on the market."
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fp? (Score:5, Funny)
Is this real? (Score:5, Funny)
I never know whether to bother with /. on April 1. The fact that TFA is on Wired is no help. April fools is no longer funny.
Re:Is this real? - Umm yes (Score:5, Funny)
Creative censored & censured him.
Shame on Creative.
Shame on Daniel for making Fista work
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Re:Is this real? - Umm yes (Score:5, Interesting)
"Alchemy: My last ALchemy release (1.00.08) was completely unlocked and could be used with any sound device from any vendor."
So the reason why they shut him down was he released a version of their software that would enable advanced creative only (software) features to say, work on an integrated sound driver. His bad, and he did that as a result of creative 'removing' all links on their support forms to his (working) vista drivers.
According to his words in TFA he's still modding but 'not the forbidden mods' that creative really was upset at him for doing.
He's lucky he's in Brazil, I guess.
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Re:Is this real? - Umm yes (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Is this real? - Umm yes (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Is this real? - Umm yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Or they are just lawsuit happy jerks. That is a nonzero possibility as well. I thought it was funny that the Creative exec was basically saying "It's our right to release broken drivers if we want to". Clearly Creative knows a lot about broken drivers.
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Re:Is this real? - Umm yes (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Is this real? (Score:5, Informative)
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Do NOT buy Creative Sound Cards (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not a problem with Vista, it is a problem with Creative if they do that.
So, do not buy Creative sound cards and let them go out of business.
Creative Alternatives (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Do NOT buy Creative Sound Cards (Score:5, Interesting)
That being said - the future is software processing anyhow. With multi-core machines being standard equipment on all new machines, it makes sense to simply devote part of a core to audio processing, and screw the hardware and the many, many troubles it causes audio programmers. Vista doesn't support audio hardware acceleration anymore (Creative wrote their own OpenAL pipeline to get around this). Our upcoming game will probably only support hardware acceleration on X-Fi class cards. Anything else, it's simply not worth it, and we'll switch to software mode.
I'm not condoning Creative's actions by any means. It seems pretty obvious that they're a bit panicked about the tanking sales of PC audio hardware, and so are making idiots of themselves by irritating their few remaining customers. Stupid...
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Modding closed source can be troublesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair usage and licensing? (Score:5, Interesting)
So while I understand Creative's beef about messing with their software, the reason this is a firestorm issue is that since the software in question is a driver the hardware becomes an inseparable part of the equation.
And this leaves aside the whole other issue of crippling.
Drivers in (Score:5, Insightful)
The who thing is stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
So, there is no "infringement" here.
Daniel should phrase what he does better, he isn't getting donations for the "driver," as this is a free download and already licensed by creative. He is getting donations for the "work" of modding. In other words, he is being paid for support not the driver.
Thus he is not running afoul of any IP laws. He is lawfully applying his expertise to private customers running third party hardware and and software, which they have the right to use.
Braziliantech of A7V BIOS fame (Score:5, Interesting)
Analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
This is really all Creative were doing, attempting to force enough of a difference between bottem end products and older products and the new top of the range technologies to ensure sales stay up. You cannot really blame them this this commercial decision.
what I take exception to is the fact that they have made none of this clear to the consumers. and worse, they have actively degraded the functionality of hardware people have already paid for by means of drivers for a new operation system.
In other words it is as though you purchased a car hifi and used it for a year in your Ford. Then you purchased an Mercedes and fitted the same car hifi and found the audio output was at half the resolution in your new car. If you have wanted to spend the money and pay for double the resolution then nobody would of batted an eyelid - but you would reasonably expect that the original performace would of been preserved. At the very least you would of expected some notification or warning.
And thats why Creative are in hot water - apart from their shockingly rude and arrogant behaviour that is.
Creative retracts forum post. (Score:5, Informative)
Gave up many years ago (Score:5, Informative)
I bought a Audigy (1) and never got the firewire port working or any drivers to work since XP SP2.
For years I had been annoyed at the rubbish that installs with the drive CD's and how the GUI is totally at odds with Windows.
I switched to Diamond (with DDL optical output) and Via sound cards (24bit / 96kHz) for a fraction of the price. I haven't looked back, updates are available for vista and they work just fine.
Due to my bad experiences with Creative and driver support I actively steer clear of *any* product they make for over 5 years and advise family and friends to do the same.
Re:Idiots. (Score:5, Insightful)
must be the new 'american way'; to reward companies for bad behavior (multiple times over) with a CASHIER'S CHECK.
(sigh).
no, he should NOT send money to the company that caused the problem. good grief, man, what are you thinking?
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Re:Idiots. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Idiots. (Score:5, Funny)
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Except that it's their strategy (Score:5, Informative)
Looks to me like they are trying to cash in on the Wintel upgrade cycle for no good technical reason: "Oh, if you want to enable all of Vista's advanced features, you need to buy this card over here."
Bastards, but probably bastards who will make lots of money.
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Re:Idiots. (Score:5, Insightful)
Normally I'd agree. But why should I lose features in Vista because Creative decided that the card I already bought shouldn't work in a new OS? I can only think it is to encourage people to buy new cards. That's slimey.
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