Last Wednesday, a company called Falling Leaf Systems announced the availability of an alpha of something called the Alky Project. The Alky Project has a lofty goal: to liberate DirectX 10 gaming from the confines of Vista and bring it first to Windows XP, and then to Linux and OS X. The project plans to do this by building a converter that can take in a DX10 game executable and spit out a modified version that can be run on a (non-Vista) target OS. The target OS must be x86-based, which rules out the PPC version of OS X, since the converter doesn't do any binary translation.

Ars' own Joel Hruska spent part of the day today trying to view Alky's DX10 demos under Windows XP but without success. He reports back on his efforts as follows:

I spent part of the day trying to view the DX10 demos Alky recommends, without success. Attempting to view the recommended DX10 tutorial in requires installation of Visual C++ Express Edition, the DX10 SDK, and the Microsoft Platform SDK for Windows Server 2003 R2. Put together, that's at least 1GB of downloads. Even after installing all three tools and configuring Visual C++ to include data from the DX10 SDK package when compiling code, I was still unable to successfully run the recommended tutorial. In short, the provided preview build is anything but a concise demo for the project.

Clearly, Alky has a long way to go before even XP users, much less Mac and Linux users, can easily convert DX10 games for use on their platform of choice, but the fact that the alpha does allegedly work for some folks is promising.

To help fund the project, Falling Leaf has set up the Sapling Program, which lets those who donate $50 get access to development builds and other perks.

As a Mac user who's annoyed at the prospect of ever installing Vista on my machine, I wish the folks at Falling Leaf the best of luck with their efforts. But right now, with a brand new company and a lead engineer who's a 19 year-old programmer, the Alky Project will have to fight the perception that it's long on ambition and youthful enthusiasm and short on the amount of financial and human resources that it'll take to complete a project of this magnitude.