Running Vista Beta (Longhorn)

I've played with the Vista betas as well. I think two things are at work here. 1.) Some compatibility may be broken in Vista, and 2.) the Vista betas can't be trusted to run games or anything video card related yet.

I say this because I tested all of my PC games and emulators in Vista. All Direct Draw based emulators ran at less than half speed (Nestopia, ZSNES, Visualboy Advance, etc), and most of the Direct3D and OpenGL stuff (i.e. 3-D games and programs) just will not run.

For now I can only tell you to wait for a later beta or the final release of Vista. The Project64 people can't be bothered to write code for an OS than is in such disrepair and despite LOOKING pretty complete, don't think Vista is anywhere close to working. I don't know why, but the Vista development team is really trying my patience. I used both a beta and RC1 of Windows XP before it was out, and it like... worked. It worked REALLY well and was almost identical (at RC1) to the final product with the same compatibility levels (until later than yr when they released some compatibility updates).

Vista scares me because they basically have this new philosophy. They will add X number of broke ideas/features, then they will try to stablize them (which is where we are now on the Vista betas), and they will work up until we are out of time, then pull everything they couldn't stablize. They have already pulled many major Vista features. By the time we see a final Vista, it will be a slow, ugly, incompatible Windows XP!! I've been on the MS bus since Windows 98SE, and became HAPPY on the MS bus with Windows 2000 and XP. Vista is shaping up to be a step BACKWARDS and no one sees it or cares...

Bare in mind that Vista is in the beta stages, and not officially released. It is by no means functional enough to use as a primary OS, and is therefore not yet supported by the PJ64 team.

By the time Vista is officially released, you can expect compatibility with PJ64 either by directly by the PJ64 devs or indirectly through driver enhancements for your hardware (as only preliminary beta drivers exist for Vista as of right now) or both.

well i can tell you all that Vista has been pulled again to have 60% of its code rewritten.. in that sense.. we will probably see a Vista Alpha in the coming months.. instead of beta 3

I've read here and there that the code being rewritten was an erroneous news story. I think that was more based in rumor and got blown out of proportion. It COULD happen (probably SHOULD happen), but I am not counting on it. That wouldn't be within their current development practices. I don't know for sure what is going on with that. I hope they are recoding.

well they aren't releasing it till mid next yr so it would give them plenty of time to.

I've heard that Vista will only have DirectX 10.
The older versions will only be emulated, which causes slower speed in all games, which aren't desined for Vista.
Since you version is beta, and the old DirectX isn't used anymore, it uses the incomlete emulation, wich doesn't work correctly jet.

i thought that at first as well but its incorrect

Vista's Dx implementation is very tricky

Dx 10 is an entire API on its own
Dx 9L will also be there separate from Dx10 but will allow support for Dx9,8,7,6 etc

the emulators not working is just plain lack of driver and OS compatibility