#1 Burning Software

Hi,

I would like to know if Starburn SDK supports Microsoft Windows 64-bit (beta or later). If no, do you plan to support it and when ?

Thanks

Christian

Christian,

first of all let's divide "64-bit support" into "AMD64 support" and "IA64 support". Starting from second one. To run on Itanium/Itanium2 generic x86 binaries should be really replaced with IA64 ones as IA64 machines cannot run x86 code. However keeping in mind such a facts:

- high Itanium (out of production and out of stock) and Itanium2 prices (it's still not possible to have Itanium2-based machine here for less then 2.5K$)

- low number of Itanium and Itanium2 machines in % from total machine park

- lack of support from third-party libraries (no Windows Media Formats SDK and OGG Vorbis SDK for IA64) so no compressed sound support on IA64 at all

makes IA64 customers a true rare ones. It simply does not make sense to double development and testing time to raise some even $1.5 license customers. You're maybe second or third who had ever asked about 64 bits...

However with AMD64 the picture is a bit different. AMD64 machines are very reasonably priced, can run x86 32-bit binaries AS IS and have more or less support for legacy 32-bit code (it's possible to "thunk" to 32-bit x86 code from AMD64 code). This makes AMD64 more or less a candidate for porting. But as I've told current StarBurn can work on AMD64 AS IS (I'm writing this lines from Athlon64 3400+ myself) w/o recompiling to 32-bits. StarBurn would not develop anything with 32->64 bit upgrade.

That's the story So no IA64 b/s market does not exist and no AMD64 b/s current 32-bit code works on AMD64 just fine.

HOWEVER. We're using MS IFS Kit/DDK to build the library. So it's possble to have IA64 and AMD64 "native" port even today. If there would be a customer wanting to sponsor some of the development we'll be happy to start. I'll be doing AMD64 port myself after we'll be done with full GUI sampled version. But it would be closer to the January or February. And I'm not sure -- would I use curret codebase or swap it to the fresh one. StarBurn is more then 8 megabytes of source code. Quite a number of code to port and check