We all know that DirectX10, for many of us, means an expensive upgrade and the move to a new operating system. We also know that DirectX10 is going to be necessary to play DX10 games such as Crysis and Halo 2 for the PC. What if I told you that a project sought to change that? That you could run DirectX10-exclusive games such as Halo 2 for PC on a DirectX9 platform with Windows 2000? Thanks to the Alky Project, we may not have to spend a penny to enjoy DirectX10 goodness. A quote from their official blog (I know, it's not an official web-page, but they do link to working models) tells us exactly how we can make DirectX10 work without spending at least $270 on a DirectX10 upgrade ($170 NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT, $100 Windows Vista Home Basic).

I'm proud to release a preview of our DirectX 10 compatibility libraries. These libraries allow the use of DirectX 10 games on platforms other than Microsoft 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 preview/beta build is here. Make sure to read the README file, as it will tell you exactly how to install the project.