Recently, I wrote about Creative Labs going after a certain community software modder whose sin was to make his audio drivers work the way they’re supposed to work. Here’s an excerpt of what he had to say about it:
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It all started when Creative released the first beta of ALchemy for X-Fi cards, saying it used X-Fi’s advanced capabilities (EAX5). After some investigation, I’ve found an EAX5.0 check and patched it… and it worked! Sometime later, they released the final version of ALchemy X-Fi and the paid version of ALchemy Audigy. I was really mad at them, they didn’t release a new Audigy driver and were charging Audigy owners for a software that runs on top of bugged drivers? What is the point of that? Then I modified the X-Fi “free” version of ALchemy, not the paid version. I did the same with the later versions, but when they released the 1.00.11, I couldn’t patch it anymore. So I bought it, just for the sake of it. Well, I did manage to patch the latest version of ALchemy X-Fi to run on any card, without even removing Safecast, but I’m done with that. [...] Modding is OK I don’t think there was something wrong with mods themselves. Modding is a common practice among enthusiasts and I don’t recall some company threatening a modder, unless you allow an exclusive feature to be used with competitor products (ie: SLI on non-NVIDIA chipsers or ALchemy on competitor products, as I’ve said before). Remember the Promise Ultra to Fasttrak mod? It was even published on a well known review site. There was also the GeForce to Quadro mod, the NVIDIA nForce 4 to SLI mod, also published on review sites. What I did wrong I’ve asked for donations. Do I really need the money? No, thank God I don’t. I thought it would be ok to ask for donations so I could buy new hardware to support. I did buy some hardware: an used Live! 5.1 for ~$15 and a new Audigy SE for $60. Computer hardware is really expensive here in Brazil. An X-Fi Xtreme Gamer costs about $240 here, with taxes and shipping, The same card can be bought for ~$80 in the US. I just can’t spend my money buying new hardware that I won’t even use. Even the features I’ve enabled, I don’t use. Later I tried to encourage donations to release the DDL feature for X-Fi and Crystalizer for Audigy. I said something like “the more people donate, the faster I’ll release”. This was even worse, but I was so eager to modding that I didn’t think straight. I was hoping to get a X-Fi asap. While I did ask for donations, once released, the downloads would be public. I do recognize that I deserve some criticism for that. To date, I’ve got $146, with amounts ranging from $1 to $50 (this value is still uncleared). Reversing ALchemy was also wrong, I know. But I reiterate, what is the point of improving ALchemy and charging for it, when it requires an improved driver? It was my protest against Creative. What Creative did wrong - They publicly threatened me, just to show their arrogance. If they had contacted me by e-mail or private message I would do the same thing (remove everything) and no one would know about their insatisfaction. - Removed everything I posted in the forums, even if unrelated to the “forbidden” stuff.If they can’t provide better drivers, let people make their own choice. - They did not recognize my hard work. I’ve been supporting about every Creative PCI soundcard, would even support USB devices if I had one of them. To date, the Audigy Vista Support Pack was downloaded about 20,000 times. The current situation DDL encoder and Crystalizer were not publicly released. I’ve deleted the P17 to Xtreme Audio mod and ALchemy from FileFront (where I store the files). I’ve been told they will allow me to continue with my mods, except the “forbidden” ones. I’m also allowed to receive donations. Download of my mods
http://hosted.filefront.com/braziliantech/