Native Development Crack for Zune HD
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Tuesday, 20 April 2010 03:03 |
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 Although it didn't came out with whistles and fireworks, The Zune HD is a very interesting piece of technology, offering a slick and attractive user interface. If you didn't know, developers can write games for it, but there is a catch to this.
Third-party games must be developed using Microsoft's .NET-based XNA Framework. Because XNA normally provides high-performance Direct3D graphics this shouldn't be a problem, but the downside of this is that on the Zune HD, XNA supports only simple 2D graphics with no hardware accelerated 3D and this results in a lackluster graphical performance, although the NVIDIA Tegra which powers the Zune HD is very capable. Because of this restricted environment, third-party applications can't access the Internet through the device's WiFi connection.
Get acquintated with OpenZDK. It appears that a possibility to run native applications on the Zune emerged by exploiting a flaw in the Zune's firmware, unleashing the full power of the Zune's hardware to developers: the most important thing is that programs can use the widespread OpenGL ES 2.0 API to take advantage of all the capabilities of the Tegra chip. By doing this, third-party applications aer allowed to achieve the same quality as Microsoft's own Zune games like Project Gotham Racing: Ferrari Edition.
The Zune HD is very capable of providing a first-rate gaming experience as being demonstrated by those Microsoft-published games like PGR, which is extremely good-looking and funny.
From now on, developers should have an easy time to get up to speed on native development with the ZDK. Being based on Windows CE 6, The Zune HD operating system offers development and deployment because it is a widely supported and well understood OS. On the other side, OpenGL is familiar to a lot of game developers.
Don't get to anxious though because Microsoft might opt for fixing the exploit that are being used to enable native Zune development. The Zune HD has a lot of potential but the downside of this is the fact that it requires hacks to live up to it.
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