It is with great sadness that I announce the closing of Falling Leaf Systems, LLC. We set out over a year ago to provide users of both "old and unsupported" as well as "alternative" Operating Systems the ability to run the latest games for the PC. Unfortunately, Falling Leaf Systems was unable to achieve that goal.

However, every ending tends to open another door for opportunity and though we are saddened to announce our departure, we are almost as excited to announce the immediate availability of ALL source code for the Alky Project! It is licensed under the LGPL and includes both the orginal Alky Converter source used to convert the popular Prey Demo to run on OSX and Linux, as well as the alpha release of the Alky Compatibility Libraries which attempted to provide a DirectX10 compatible runtime for Windows XP.

We have also created some new forums on the site for users to discuss the coming cycle of DirectX 10 based games. We hope that you'll pop in there from time to time, and we also hope you join our mailing list to receive an announcement in case some other Open Source project decides to carry on the Alky banner.

We appreciate all your past support; Happy gaming!

Many of those following our efforts have been clamoring for some information over the past week or so as to the progress of our various efforts. I apologize for the wait but am finally in the position to give a status update on said progress. We are proud to announce the immediate availability of "Alky for Applications" version 1.0. Those who followed Project VAIO before its merger with Falling Leaf Systems will remember it by that name. It has been re-branded and contains many bug fixes as well as improved support for the Windows Sidebar.

Our excitement over the announcement of "Alky for Applications" is tempered by the fact that we regretfully also announce that support for Halo 2 and Shadowrun will not come until the middle or end of August. The main reason for the short delay stems from the difficulty of implementing Windows Live support in a truly transparent manner. It has proven more difficult than we first envisioned, but we are making great strides. While many will be disappointed or even a bit angry, we hope that the prevention of having your Live account banned will be worth the wait.

Lastly, we have nothing definitive to report in regards to our support for DirectX 10 based games. As announced in the very beginning, this is a monumental effort and will take a great deal of time to implement properly. We hope to have a fully functioning demo in two months or so.

We appreciate your continued support and look forward to bringing you great products in the future.

Until next time,

Brian Thomason
CEO
Falling Leaf Systems, LLC

After months of deliberation, we're proud to announce that we have "merged" with Project VAIO from over at fromvistatoxp.com. Technically speaking, they have joined our ranks and we'll all be operating under the Falling Leaf flag from now on. This is exciting news for us not only because it provides us with some new talent, but it also provides us with a new codebase to merge with our own and work to improve.

One thing this has immediately made possible is a much shorter timeframe on the release of our product for supporting Halo 2 and Shadowrun on Windows XP. You can place preorders of these games on our site through Amazon and receive, free of charge, our initial release of the Alky Compatibility Libraries when they launch. Currently, our estimate is late July, but it isn't solid.

Until next time,
- Brian Thomason
CEO of Falling Leaf Systems

Finally making use of this blog I created almost a year ago. What a busy year it's turned out to be, from the inception of the Alky Project to the creation of Falling Leaf Systems and the Sapling Program.

As a fitting start to this blog, I'm proud to release a preview of our Alky compatibility libraries for Microsoft DirectX 10 enabled games. These libraries allow the use of DirectX 10 games on platforms other than Windows Vista, and increase hardware compatibility even on Vista, by compiling Geometry Shaders down to native machine code for execution where hardware isn't capable of running it. No longer will you have to upgrade your OS and video card(s) to play the latest games.

The current preview allows you to run a number of examples from the Microsoft DirectX SDK on Windows XP. They're not the greatest thing since sliced bread, but we want to whet your appetite. We hope to release builds in the coming months progressing from demos to fully functional games. We also plan to post on this blog from time to time with screenshots and videos of what's to come.

The preview build is available here. Inside this zip is a README.TXT file with complete instructions on where to install the files (don't worry, we'll have an installer in the near future) and how to get and run the examples from the SDK.

We at Falling Leaf welcome your feedback, and we're committed to giving you the best high-end gaming experience possible, regardless of OS.

Enjoy,
- Cody Brocious
Lead Alky Engineer