No it’s not a delayed April fool’s joke. Falling Leaf Systems has actually released an alpha version of its DirectX 10 compatibility libraries for Windows XP. This makes it possible to run DirectX 10 code under other operating systems than Windows Vista. This was made possible by recompiling the Geometry Shaders to pure machine code. In fact, this makes it possible to run DirectX 10 code with hardware that is not DirectX 10 per se. As mentioned before, this is an alpha build and the number of functions is quite limited, but Falling Leaf Systems’ Alky Project seems to be exactly what everyone has been waiting for. During the coming months they promise to launch new versions wire more and better examples, e.g. games.
