Home | Forums | Article Search | Subscribe & Shop | Contact Us | Log Out The Saint Email This Print This View My Personal Library Frontside August 2002 • Vol.2 Issue 8 Page(s) 13-14 in print issue Add To My Personal Library The Saint Before Xbox Alex St. John was one of the founding creators of Microsoft's DirectX technology. He is the subject of the book "Renegades Of The Empire" about the creation of DirectX and Chromeffects, an early effort by Microsoft to create a multimedia browser. Today Alex is president and CEO of WildTangent Inc., a technology company devoted to delivering CD-ROM quality entertainment content over the Web. I just read Dean Takahashi's new book, "Opening the Xbox." Naturally, once I learned that I was mentioned in it, I searched it diligently for all Saint-related references. This was my favorite quote: "I feel like there's a little bit of Alex in every Xbox that we're going to make." –J. Allard. I'm very flattered. Reading the book brought back a lot of memories about the precursor days of Xbox at Microsoft. When I joined the empire way back in 1992, the 3DO was the great hope for a successful American game console. Back then Microsoft was all about getting the CD-ROM adopted as the standard data medium to the PC. Multimedia would be all the rage for the PC. It sounded exciting, but Microsoft's vision of multimedia was basically video content with limited inter-activity (remember Myst?). Microsoft was very influenced by Apple's leadership in this kind of multimedia at that time. I was an avid DOS gamer and found it mystifying that the highly popular and engaging PC games published for DOS were largely ignored while Microsoft devoted its energies to creating technologies and content with the Macromedia Shockwave kind of feel to it. At one point, Microsoft's consumer division announced that they were going to publish 100 multimedia CD-ROM titles one year. Remember Julia Child's Wine Guide and Microsoft Dogs? How about BOB? If you ever wonder where that annoying paper clip in Word came from, it's all that is left of Microsoft's revolutionary BOB product. One day I came to work and was confronted by a giant poster in the front lobby of a bull's-eye with a blue cartoon character with crossed eyes and lolling tongue exploding out of the center of it. The tag line was "McZee IS COMING!" McZee was to be the leading character for all of Microsoft's upcoming children's titles. McZee looked remarkably like an asphyxiating pedophile you wouldn't want coming anywhere near your children. Around the same time, Microsoft research, which had recruited many of the greatest minds in 3D graphics, was hard at work inventing next-generation 3D hardware acceleration for consumers. The project's code name was Talisman. In retrospect, the architecture was absurd, but at a time when the consumer 3D hardware business was still nascent, it was a deadly serious strategic effort at MS. Here's a quote from an original Talisman spec dated October 1995: "Even though the multimedia PC market is growing fast, the market for dedicated video games continues strong. In many cases these systems compete for customers with the PC. In cases where the customer is purchasing both a PC and a video game, these represent dollars that could be available to the PC market alone. Improving the PC's ability to capture this entertainment market is one of the primary motivations for the Talisman project." Ironically, this was dated one month after we had shipped DirectX 1.0 for Windows 95. The battle for controlling 3D standards on the PC would ultimately be won by Direct3D. Talisman was a great example of pre-Xbox thinking at Microsoft. That division of MS also had several set-top box initiatives underway, all efforts to design proprietary hardware to play interactive video on a TV set. None of them bore much fruit, which ultimately led MS to acquire WebTV for half a billion dollars a few years later. I had been hired to help evolve the Windows 95 and Windows NT printing architecture, but by late 1993 I had done everything I could for those OSes before their respective releases. I was intensely interested in gaming, and persuaded my management to make me Microsoft's first Game Evangelist. I immediately departed on a road trip to meet with the leading game developers at that time to find out what they needed from Windows to make it a great gaming OS. On this trip I met John Carmack at id, who gave me the source to DOOM to port to Windows; Richard Garriot at Origin, who later sent three engineers to Microsoft to consult on the design for DirectX 1.0; Mindscape, where I first met Kevin Bachus; and Looking Glass, where I first met Seamus Blackley [see May CPU, pg. 108], as well as Activision, EA, and many others. McZee Is Coming :Be afraid. Be very, very afraid. Visit members.tripod.com/~s9zq5r/sfx.htm to see these images, which were part of the site's Sick Ribbon Campaign To Ban Microsoft's McZee. The primary feedback from that trip was "Windows is fat, slow and bloated; try to keep it out of our way, and make sure your DOS mode doesn't break our games." Thus we spent most of 1994 collecting hundreds of DOS games and trying to make them run reliably in Windows' protected mode—a feat achieved by one Raymond Chen, a Microsoft developer who belongs in the history books of the game industry for single-handedly putting DOS to death by patching over 1,000 DOS video games to run in Windows 95. At the same time I was working with a small renegade group in the research division, which was working on a fast graphics API for Windows called WinG. We ported Doom to WinG and showed the game industry for the first time that it might actually be possible to achieve reasonable video performance for games inside the Windows OS. This led to a small flow of games for Windows 3.1 for the 1994 Xmas season . . . and the infamous Disney Lion King disaster that precipitated the creation of DirectX. The Disney Lion King disaster started with Disney being persuaded that WinG could provide adequate video performance to justify making their latest children's title a Windows-only game. Naturally, we were very proud of ourselves . . . that is, until the post-Xmas edition of The Wall Street Journal featured a cover article with the headline, "Disney spoils Christmas for children everywhere." Compaq had shipped over a million consumer computers into the distribution channel with broken Cirrus video drivers; Lion King had never been tested on them. On Christmas morning, children around the country opened their new Compaq Presarios, installed their new Lion King game, and were treated to a spectacular OS crash and blue screen. I don't care to relive the sordid details of what followed thereafter, but suffice it to say that Disney was not amused. I realized that if we really wanted Windows to be a serious gaming platform, we would have to devote more energy to it than just hacking together a faster graphics API that may or may not work reliably on most video hardware. DirectX was conceived to be an operating system—a real-time OS that would live within Windows and whose primary function was to blot out the giant and cumbersome Windows OS, leaving only the core services that were useful for games. DirectX was called DirectX because it was also meant to provide direct access to low-level multimedia hardware services such as sound, graphics, the joystick, etc. It would provide a very thin veneer of abstraction on top of the media hardware, enabling game developers to use advanced hardware features in a standardized way, while allowing the hardware vendors relative freedom to compete with one another for better performance and architecture. The vast majority of the code in DirectX 1.0 was dedicated to preventing the Windows OS from trying to "add value" that would impact game performance while a game was running. Two friends of mine (Craig Eisler and Eric Engstrom) who had also been evangelists at Microsoft moved to the systems group to build DirectX. The first specification for DirectX was presented to leading developers from the game industry in November 1994. It was met with great interest and skepticism. We didn't have much support for our project at Microsoft. Although we reverently believed that DirectX would be the PC's answer to the onslaught of Japanese consoles entering the U.S. market, Microsoft had already placed its strategic bets elsewhere. Being young and short on political correctness, we called our effort The Manhattan Project and printed black T-shirts with neon green nuclear-blast mushroom clouds on them that read, "Microsoft Manhattan Project, Shall we play a game?" We adopted the radiation symbol as the logo for DirectX. Later, as DirectX become widely adopted by the game community, we were forced to alter the logo . . . instead of being a neon green radiation symbol, it became a neon green "X." You'll find the descendant of that logo on your DirectXbox. Share your thoughts with TheSaint@cpumag.com. Infinite Loop: Ounce Of Prevention? Antivirus programs comprise heuristic algorithms, TSRs, and updating utilities, but they're still mostly long lists of virus definitions. Check out the folder sizes of these fully updated AV installations: Norton AntiVirus 2002 on WinXP Home: 12.4MB Trend Micro PC-cillin 2000 on Win98: 39.9MB Meanwhile, attachments of common threats are much tinier: W32.Badtrans.B@mm: 29KB W32.Nimda.A@mm: 57KB W32.Sircam.Worm@mm: at least 134KB While the saying goes that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, it appears that when it comes to computer viruses, you need up to 86 pounds of virus prevention to cure an ounce of virus. Want more information about a topic you found of interest while reading this article? Type a word or phrase that identifies the topic and click "Search" to find relevant articles from within our editorial database. 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