How to Get XNA Projects to Run Without Pixel Shader Support

It’s taken some time, and I’ve finally decided to take another crack at this issue. The issue is, you can not run XNA projects on a machine without pixel shader 1.1 or greater. But with a bit of creative editing, you can run those projects now, without PS support. I’ve tested this on a IBM Thinkpad T41.

This is the error you get with a machine without Pixel Shaders.

Now that the new ReferenceGraphicsDeviceManager is being called instead of the original GraphicsDeviceManager you can get the projects to at least run. I haven’t testing any sprites or anything, I’ll get to that later. My main goal now is to port this Zune Physics Engine I did back in November 2008, to be able to run on a windows box.

There is a ReferenceGraphicsDeviceManager class floating around that needed to be edited. There were calls to a CreateOptions enumeration that are not being used anymore. All references to that were deleted or commented out. And some other function(s) use TextureUsage now. You may also need to go into your DirectX settings and change a setting to use software raster possibly.

Get the project here, and get the ReferenceGraphicsDeviceManager here