[casual_games] More good news on Vista!

[Ben Lewis]

Alex is right, Trymedia's ActiveMARK 5.42 does NOT work with Vista.
ActiveMARK 2007 does work, but some portals (at least Big Fish Games as of
12/18/06) don't use it yet, and it may present new problems not experienced
under previous versions of ActiveMARK. Here's an e-mail we sent to Trymedia
last month about the issue:

"While the ActiveMark 5.42 DRM works wonderfully on every released version
of Windows we've tested on, it is currently having problems with Windows
Vista RC1.  When the DRM is not applied, our game works fine.  When the DRM
is applied, the game only works a single time when launched from the
installer.  After that first run, or if you say not to run the game
immediately from the installer, every subsequent attempt to play crashes
immediately (before the DRM screen is displayed).  There are no details
given in the dialog, it just says 'EnchantedGardens.exe has stopped working.
A problem caused the program to stop working correctly.  Windows will close
the program and notify you if a solution is available.'


It's important to us to ship a version compatible with Windows Vista.  If
there is any sort of patch available to resolve this error, we'd be very
interested in obtaining it.  Also note, we are currently required to use the
'vstool.exe' patch on any executable prior to packaging.  This patch
resolved a floating point runtime error we had on startup after packaging."


Trymedia's response:

"All versions of ActiveMARK before ActiveMARK 2007 need to have a shim
applied to work under MS Vista.  We are compiling a guide to creating these
shims which need to be installed to the shim database when the game is
installed.  ActiveMARK 2007 will avoid the need for the shim, as well as
natively working with Visual Studio 2005."


So... portals that use Trymedia DRM will either need to start packaging
their games with ActiveMARK 2007, or apply these shims (?) during
installation, or accept a newly packaged version from their developers -
none of which may happen anytime soon. However, Oberon uses
Armadillo/SoftwarePassport for DRM, not ActiveMARK.

 

 

Ben Lewis
Yatec Games
Marketing and Sales
(225)274-1550  Ext. 149
 <http://www.yatecgames.com/> www.yatecgames.com 

 

 

  _____  

From: Jeff Siegel [mailto:jeff.siegel at jeffmedia.com] 
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2007 7:42 AM
To: 'IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List'
Subject: Re: [casual_games] More good news on Vista!

 

To go back to Alex's comment, what do you mean when you say that Vista
'breaks' Trymedia's DRM. It doesn't allow it to boot? It let's people copy
the game? Please clarify.

 

Thanks,

Jeff

 

  _____  

From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of Joe Pantuso
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2007 8:37 AM
To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
Subject: Re: [casual_games] More good news on Vista!

 

I guess this explains why we're getting increased traction with OEMs, we've
been Vista ready with our client and all games since the week before XMas.

 

Any small ISVs that haven't yet tried things with Vista, two things I would
mention to you.  One is that MS has a program for ISVs called 'Empower'
which gets you an MSDN subscription as one of the benefits, and the cost is
only $375 a year.  This would have got you access to the Vista betas a year
ago, and gets you licenses for VS 2005 etc., and will get you one license
each of Vista Ultimate/Home/Pro/etc. and is a pretty good value. 

 

Second you can pick up OEM licences of Vista right now (yea, GA is only a
week away at this point but more importantly...) at a pretty good discount
off of retail on mailorder sites like newegg.com <http://newegg.com> .

 

In addition to LUA testing you'll want to grab the Dec 2006 DXSDK and have a
look at the GameuxInstallHelper DLL which will make it possible for you to
insert your game(s) into the Game Explorer
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms687258.aspx
<http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms687258.aspx> 

 

On 1/25/07, Alex St. John <stjohnalex at yahoo.com
<mailto:stjohnalex at yahoo.com> > wrote: 

Our QA labs are doing a light test sweep of the major casual gaming portals
to see which ones are impacted severely by Vista.  It looks like Microsoft
managed to break Trymedia DRM with Vista so it's likely that most if not all
Trymedia wrapped games are broken under Vista.  This is consistent with our
analaysis that at least 50% of the casual games currently posted on the
major gaming portals are broken.  Our labs also report that RealArcade
itself is broken by Vista.  If I'm not mistaken all the casual games hosted
by Oberon on MSN are based on Trymedia DRM.  It will be interesting to see
if Microsofts own casual game offering is actually Vista ready.  

 

Since a lot of small developers don't appear to have access to Vista builds
yet we suggest that you try your games under a Windows XP LUA account.  If
it breaks there, it certainly breaks in Vista.

 

-Alex

 

 

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