Installing Kinect SDK on Windows XP.

Kinect is Microsoft idea of "Bulk Advertising". They managed to promote two of their major products in their production line with a cheap, yet feature-rich piece of hardware. Note : If you're a gamer looking to buy a kinect, I suggest you leave this blog, but if you are interested in hacking the Kinect, continue reading.

  



Cheap camera, combined with free software and licenses really helped the Kinect penetrate the market. There was just one problem with this. The Kinect SDK installs only on  Windows 7. It is a significant investment to obtain Windows 7, its licenses, Visual Studio 2010 and its licenses just to work with one piece of hardware. Atleast, I wouldn't pay for it. So I went on to download the Kinect SDK to see it for myself. I thought maybe a few features might work and that's all I might need for now. Who knows?

So I downloaded the KinectSDK-v1.0-beta2-x86.msi- its a 20.8 MB file that takes around 5 mins to downlaod on a decent broadband connection. After downloading, I double clicked on the file to see what happens, I also had plans of choosing "Custom Install" and trying out various combiantions of sub-packages to see if a few features worked and others did not. Well, The installer started and this screen came:-

This showed that the installer checks for the OS-version before even starting. So I did a little research to edit windows pakage installers, and found this great software that allows you to edit Windows installers - these typical .msi file editors. Orca is a freeware and is available at the first link in google search for "orca download". This is the a picture of KinectSDK-v1.0-beta2-x86.msi opened with orca:-

After browsing through the tables with Orca, I found this interesting one called LaunchCondition.You can see it here:-



This table stores the pre-requisite information. There it was, a description line saying, it requires Windows 7 or higher. But what do you change it to? I thought, let's simply make the condition field Installer OR VersionNT >= 0, and that's exactly what I did. It sounded logical at that point. It is checking for the version. If I say >= 0, XP is obviously not less than 0, right?

Fingers crossed, I saved the edited installer and started the setup again. Voila! It worked. It actually worked. I'm going to test teh SDK out now. Adios!