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Programmers, game designers would it be workable to have a game install its own OS? When you want to play your PC would reboot into a bare bones OS without all the bloat of windows. The game OS could link to all the DLL's and such already on your C: drive. More RAM, no unnecessary processes tying up CPU cycles. What's not to love? Game company's could even release optimized drivers for popular vedio and sound cards. Why hasn't this been done. Multiple games could even run on the same OS.
"Duel" boot?
"Company's"?
Care to specify the "bloat" you're talking about? Which processes do you consider "unnecessary", and how much RAM and CPU time do they use?
I dare you to ask this question at Ars Technica!
Unnecessary Ram and CPU use such as office running in the background or pdf reader loaded and ready anything not being used by the game. Games always seem to push the limits of what the latest machines can do. This would seem to be a way to get the most out of avable hardware.
What is Ars Technical?
Notwithstanding the previous poster's grammar concerns, the major problem with vectoring into existing .DLLs and APIs is of course that they're proprietary. It is not in MSFT's interests to let you arse around in some pseudo-DOS environment when they can exercise more control (and make more money) by ensuring your game is compliant with the "Games for Windows" standard and charging you a premium to label your game as such.
What we want - and what we're getting - is a more advanced and stable 3d environment in Linux, upon which games can be dropped. I honestly feel that although Ubuntu aren't technically innovators, they are the people to watch for home computing and accessibility of gaming on X86 or 64-bit tin. And although MSFT can screed whatever crap they want all over our stupid, upturned faces, open source advocates don't tolerate it. This may well be the explanation for MSFT's focus on the X-Box and homicide of their in-house PC gaming team.
To put it another way, most of my kit is Red Hat, VMWare (with Win2k3 VMs) or Ubuntu. The only reason I maintain an XPSP2 PC is for FSX. MSFT have now dropped FSX and eventually the OS offerings will overtake it, regardless of the 3rd party plugins.
Full disclosure: I am an MCSE +Sec +Exchange, an employee of a Gold Partner, and an MVP.
http://arstechnica.com/Quote:
Originally posted by Glazer
Enjoy.
The main problem is the fantastic complexity of writing a usable operating system that works on a wide range of hardware.
I can't quibble with that - and it's the reason why Apples have been so successful as a tool*. I can't say the same for PCs I've had fitted with either ATI or nVidia kit - even for basic tasks.Quote:
Originally posted by CRSP
Linux or not, you still need well-matched hardware with good driver support. Despite my stated qualifications, I'm not a fanboi - but I do have to wonder sometimes whether MSFT are really due the criticism they get. The problem is usually because someone has built a Zotz motherboard with Watusi-Fandango memory and a Mad-as-a-Banjo graphics card.
Let's just say I'm agnostic. I'm not fond of Microsoft because of their corporate behaviours, but I have enormous respect for the products - especially in the server range. **
* I still have a Mac IIfx and a Quadra 650 who are quite functional and, apart from monitors blowing up through age, have never given a day of trouble. With Mac-approved software.
** The machine I'm posting from is an IBM Thinkpad R52 running Win2k3 Server R2 SP2. It's solid as hell.
Maybe you guys are too young to remember, but back in the day there were many games that would boot directly from the floppy disk, bypassing whatever OS was installed on the computer. See this wikipedia article for more details http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_booter
Two such games off the top of my head are Microsoft's Decathlon and The Kristal.
Main reasons for that were copy protection and memory issues. Memory was really tiny back then and every single kilobyte counted. Some games wouldn't play unless there were absolutely no TSRs running on the system. I remember Microprose's Airborne Ranger would freeze halfway in the game because I had a small program for switching keyboards running.
Modern computers on the other hand have too much resources available in my opinion. They have huge hard disks and tons of memory. Yes, there are programs like Adobe quick launcher or iTunes or whatever that make a computer run like a dog, but this is mostly due to sloppy programming, not lack of resources. Now if you try to play Crysis on a 5 year old computer, that's simply impossible and there's nothing to be done about that, no matter what custom OS you make.
I could well be talking complete nonsense here. If so just ignore it.
I never play games, which is my excuse. My son in law plays Championship Manager all the time and won't let me near his computer in case I wreck the ongoing game (as if :) ) but he has to come out of Windows to play it. I don't think it unloads Windows but rather hibernates it.
Games that run with a dedicated gaming, shared OS are very common. They're called consoles. Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii (to use the current generation) all have specifically developed operating systems for games. The overhead of developing hardware abstraction layers (think OpenGL or DirectX), thread scheduling, memory management, etc. is too much for a game developer (who is already spending millions of dollars on just the game elements themselves) to shoulder without making games prohibitively expensive. A modern game just requires too much out of the hardware to do ground-up development on components that are already out there. Reinventing the wheel because you might be able to eek out a few more frames per second is a tough pitch to the accountants. And, you'd probably end up re-engineering DirectX or OpenGL anyway, because that's what video card manufacturers have built support for into their products (of course, that presupposes that had the industry not stayed with custom-developed environments for games for much longer).
Championship Manager is simply a full-screen Windows game (well, there's a Mac version too, but you mention Windows, so I'm assuming that's the version your son-in-law has). Everything in the game is managed by Windows, but in a full-screen window different from the desktop.Quote:
Originally posted by Myglaren
This is true, although back in the day of Win3.1, it was less of a big deal to roll almost everything yourself. There were games that required you to exit from Windows and run DOS/4GW. The DOS/4GW wikipedia page mentions that it was popularized by Doom, so I guess that was one of them. I think some games even shipped with bootable DOS disks (probably using DRDOS or FreeDOS).Quote:
Originally posted by Cerowyn
Nowadays you'd have to, as Cerowyn says, provide a 3D graphics subsystem, your own networking stack, drivers for all sorts of crazy hardware, etc. Maybe you could leverage linux for this, but that's still a long way from your goal -- you still have to do all sorts of hardware detection and configuration every time you boot your game, which is painful. The benefit of using the user's installed OS is that in most cases, the OS came installed with the proper drivers because it was preinstalled on the machine, and in the rest of the cases, it's the user's problem to get the drivers working before your game even starts up.
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Originally posted by McNutty
Quote:
Originally posted by McNutty
Well, for your two examples, you'd simply close Office or Acrobat... problem solved. If you've trying to run a game on a computer where the services like "DHCP Client" or "DNS Service" are using too many CPU cycles or RAM, your computer is simply too old. End of. Besides, RAM and CPU aren't as important to most games these days as the GPU is, which again is a hardware problem, not a software one.Quote:
Originally posted by Glazer
And, as most everyone else has pointed out, to make a "gaming OS" you'd need hardware recognition, drivers for the same, some sort of abstraction layer, memory management, thread scheduling, a networking stack, etc. It's a lot of work, and is far outside the scope (and budget) of almost any game publisher. If only some company would make an operating system that ran on all sorts of hardware and already had all that stuff built in...
It's a website. More importantly, they have a massive message board. Post your question there and you'd get a 16-page response as to why what you ask is a bad idea... and in more technical detail than you'd ever want to know.Quote:
Originally posted by Glazer
Thanks all. That was just a drunken thought I had. I thought there had to be a good reason.
Sorry about the spelling and grammar, I blame the bourbon. :smack
Eh... sorry for being a Grammar Nazi. I hate that I'm like that, but I just can't help myself.
One last thought: any "game on disc" system would need to update itself, and that would be problematic on a read-only medium like CD\DVD. I suppose it could be updated via a folder on the hard drive, but you'd need to always use the same computer, else you'd lose the updates. Game companies could also require the use of a USB key to write updates to, although that would annoy a lot of users. They could also offer updated ISO files for download, but that wouldn't work very well, either. Not only is this a "nightmare scenario" for them as far as piracy goes, people would be pissed at paying for a DVD the having to download 13GB worth of updates.
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