I recently reformatted my hard drive, and I updated Windows XP with the DirectX 9 runtime. I started itching to start programming again, so I installed Visual C++, and went looking for the DirectX SDK. Alas, I had not previously downloaded the SDK, so I had to download it. Since I have 56k, downloading that 230 MB of a file is gonna take a while. So while I was waiting, I found the DirectX 8 SDK, and during the installation I installed all components except the runtime. Now, having installed the DX9 runtime, and on top of that the DX8 SDK, no polygons are getting rendered! I ran the Direct3D8 sample apps, and none of them loaded! They all had some type of error. For example, the Dolphin sample app quits with "Could not load required media." Is this a problem, or was the SDK just never designed to work with later versions of DirectX installed on the system?

The samples are looking for the regkey to tell them where the DXSDK media folder is. Not sure why it didn''t setup correctly for you. You could try reinstalling the SDK or use regedit.exe and go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectX SDK

then ensure there is a string value called "DX81SDK Samples Path" or "DX8SDK Samples Path" (depending what version of the SDK you have) and make sure it has the value of: "C:\DXSDK\samples"

You can also use VC to debug the samples and find out why they''re failing. If you put a breakpoint in dxutil.cpp''s DXUtil_GetSDKMediaPath() function, you''ll see where its failing.

Jason