Creative driver modder responds to crackdown

Posted at: 6:35am 1st April 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Daniel Kawakami, also known as Daniel_K, explains his feelings about Creative’s controversial crackdown on his modded drivers

Creative landed itself in a bit of a PR nightmare when it recently tried to get heavy-handed on driver modder Daniel Kawakami, with thousands of people signing a petition to Creative, and many more expressing negative feelings towards the company. Whether driver modding is right or wrong is a hot topic, and Daniel Kawakami has now chosen to give his side of the story.

‘I'm NOT a cracker [or] a hacker,’ Kawakami told Custom PC, ‘just an enthusiast modder with basic assembly knowledge.’ As he points out, ‘modding is a common practice among enthusiasts, and I don't recall some company threatening a modder.’ Kawakami gives the notable exception of mods that allow an exclusive feature to be enabled on a competitor’s product, such as enabling SLI on a non-SLI chipset. He also points out that other mods, such as ‘the GeForce to Quadro mod,’ have also been published on review sites.

So how did it all start? Kawakami explains that it all kicked off ‘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 found an EAX5.0 check, 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 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.’

Kawakami readily acknowledges that he was in the wrong when it came to modding ALchemy, but asks: ‘what is the point of improving ALchemy and charging for it when it requires an improved driver?’ He explains that the mod was ‘my protest against Creative.’

One of the major issues surrounding the driver mods was that Kawakami asked for donations so that he could buy hardware to support his work, such as a used Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 for $15 USand a new Audigy SE for $60 US. He also points out that computer hardware is expensive in Brazil. ‘An X-Fi Xtreme Gamer costs about $240 here, with taxes and shipping,’ says Kawakami, while ‘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.’

However, Kawakami also admits that ‘later, I tried to encourage donations to release the DDL feature for X-Fi and Crystallizer for Audigy. I said something like: "the more people donate, the faster I'll release.”’ Kawakami explains this move, saying that ‘was so eager to modding that I didn't think straight. I was hoping to get an X-Fi ASAP,’ although he says that he does ‘recognise that I deserve some criticism for that.’