No thanks to publisher Aspyr, I can now play Dreamfall on my Windows Vista box.

Aspyr responded to my Support Ticket with what appears to be a form letter. The letter uses a lot of words to say, we're not supporting Windows Vista yet, so we're not helping you.

That was seven days ago.

Today, visiting developer Funcom's offical Dreamfall Web site, I discovered a link to Funcom's official Dreamfall forum. Searching the forum for "vista," I found the solution to get the game running on Windows Vista.

DirectX 10, included with Windows Vista, doesn't need an update; Dreamfall needs DirectX 9. Dreamfall installs DirectX 9 as part of the game installation, but on a Windows Vista system it doesn't install the files necessary to run the game; the DirectX 9 installer on Microsoft's Web site does install those files.

The file to which the Dreamfall forum post links is an update to DirectX 9, and not the most recent update. I downloaded and installed both that update and the latest complete version of DirectX 9 to be safe.

Dreamfall runs, and nothing bad has happened to my computer. So far.

Hopefully installing outdated, low-level tools not intended to be used with my operating system will not cause problems.