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OS Independent Games? 132

Posted by Cliff from the why-not? dept.
Jakyll asks: "Why aren't there [more] games for the PC that come on a BOOTABLE CD-ROM? Use Linux and autodetect the hardware - it would make DirectX and Microsoft irrelevant. Boot the disk just like your PC was a Playstation or an XBox - what is the main reason this isn't happening?" A few publications have been released like this: Gentoo has done this for UT 2003 and America's Army (they have their own site but it appears to be broken at this time); and there are the ScummVM Live CD ISOs, out there. Does anyone know if the major game studios have plans on doing something similar, or if not, the reasons why they aren't?
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OS Independent Games? More

OS Independent Games?

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  • what about patches? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AresTheImpaler ( 570208 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @10:25PM (#8924853)
    yeah.. but how are you going to apply patches?

    • Re:what about patches? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DA-MAN ( 17442 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @07:58PM (#8934852) Homepage
      Hell it would just suck.

      1) Game Patches, Extended Levels, and add ons would be gone
      2) Saving Games, maybe network, still slow when I have a 120GB hd sitting around empty
      3) Network Configuration for Dialup (WinModumb Support), PPPoE, 802.1x, Wireless (Drivers?), will be a hassle for playing games.
      4) Ventrilo Support?!?! How am I gonna talk shit to my buddies when they snipe me?
      5) Load Times... HD is way faster than CD/DVD
      6) Drivers, even if you include all the drivers up until this point... what happens next year when you upgrade to the nVidia GeForce Ubberfast 6000 or the ATI Radeon 10,000,000? You're shit out of luck...
      7) Always gotta have the CD/DVD on hand...

      Well you get the idea, this would stink on a PC. XBox and PS2 can do it because they have one type of hardware that doesn't change. On a PC that would be a PITA.

  • It's because... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by timothv ( 730957 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @10:26PM (#8924855)
    nobody wants to reboot their computer. Rebooting often takes a while because you have to save, close apps, and it can sometimes strain hardware such as harddrives.

    • Re:It's because... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BladeMelbourne ( 518866 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @10:42PM (#8924964)
      Most people save their work and close applications before starting a game for performance reasons (to free memory for example) and to reduce the possibility of data loss in the event of a crash.

      Rebooting takes very little time, even on my [old] P3/450. Granted it takes longer to shut down Fedora than Win98, but not much longer.

      I like the idea about bootable games, but intense FPS games require fast disk access, or gameplay can become jumpy. CD access can also be noisy compared to HD access.

      Data persitance is another reason for not having bootable CD games. Where will you store your saved games? Your preferences? Do you need to manually enter the disk/partition location each time you want to play? (or is it automatically the first FAT breed of partition found by the bootable game?)

      Offering games targeted at specific platforms (such as Windows) makes game development simpler. Microsoft provides layers such as DirectX - without it most games would need to code similar functionality themselves (increasing the cost).

      A bootable CD would require the game developer to maintain the code for their bootable OS. Most FPS games also require more than one CD worth of data - changing CDs during play would be a hassel.

      • Re:It's because... (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        And others of us have plenty of resources and like to keep our browser, email client, some bit torrents, gaim, networking, text editors, apache, postgresql, mp3 player and irc software up and running while we're playing a game. And we like to jump back and forth between the game and our work/gaim/whatever for certain types of games. And some people like to play in windowed mode (for RPGs especially) so they can multi-task.

        Having a game bootable on disk would disconnect me from work, family, friends and eve

      • Re:It's because... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by T-Ranger ( 10520 )
        What planet are you living on that FPSs require fast disk access? They load the level into memory, and play from there. If your computer is hammering the disks durring game play, then something is messed up.

        • Re:It's because... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          They do require fast disk access. Do you really want to wait 2-5 minutes while a level loads from a CD?

          Many FPS games today are much larger than 1 GB. This is a lot of data that needs to be read into RAM. Granted only one level at a time, but sprites, sounds, etc. need to be loaded. I guess it all depends upon how much RAM you have.

          • Re:It's because... (Score:2, Insightful)

            by fishfinger ( 685260 )
            But if you are using an OS which doesn't need to load up a whole graphical environment which is irrelevent to the game then there will be much more RAM available for caching game data.

            If the Gentoo live UT2003 CD detects that you have 512MB or more (very likely these days) it gives you the option of loading most of the game into memory/ramdisk!
        • You try running a modern game on less than a 5400 RPM drive. Several years ago, I tried playing a Q2 based game on a machine with an older drive, and there would be 5 second delays in-between loading points at different sections of the map because the drive was way too slow to send level data to the cache in physical RAM. Of course, modern machines are better at this because they have more RAM, but it is still a problem on slower drives. Data still has to go in and out of RAM, polling from the hard drive

  • Hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by smoondog ( 85133 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @10:30PM (#8924887)
    1) Rebooting == sux
    2) To avoid graphics problems I advise sticking with zork
    3) Can't save game or data
    4) This would only work if we can get a general linux that always works with most video cards and most audio cards ...
  • First, there's the need to reb00t. Not fun.

    Second, what about the hard drive? Most games are complex enough to require the high-speed access for files on the hard drive... CD-bootable games would either need to run entirely from the CD (PS1/2 style) or they'd need special code to mount the hard drive and use it.

    • Re:Off the top of my head... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by rusty0101 ( 565565 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @10:46PM (#8924985) Homepage Journal
      Wouldn't this depend upon the game? UT2003 off the Gentoo build would check to see if there was sufficient memory, and if so it would load the entire game into memory and play from there. I know this worked with 512 Meg of memory.

      Without knowing the specifics, I believe it created a virtual file system in memory, then copied over a compressed file system from the CD, which it then mounted, and you played from that.

      I suspect that on other alternative would be to check the hard disk for swap memory space, then use that as a file store. This should work with Linux Swap partitions, Windows fat vfat and fat32 partitions, and possibly with the NTFS drivers that allow you to write to a file as long as you do not change it's size. (If the windows NTFS swap file isn't large enough, you probably aren't going to want to play on that system anyway.)

      This could provide enough space for a game that needs more than a gig of memory, or several CD's for all of the maps, graphics, textures, etc.

      Then again, what do I know, I don't game on my PC that often....

      -Rusty

  • Drivers? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WhatAmIDoingHere ( 742870 ) <sexwithanimals@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @10:32PM (#8924904) Homepage
    The reason consoles do it so well is because one X-Box has the same everything as the next X-Box. This isn't so with computers.
    • You could argue that a Mac is, pretty much similiar.

      But really, how many different chipsets are there for gaming graphics cards? 5?
      • First Graphics Adapter options:
        NVidia,ATI,S3,Intel
        Second Graphics Adapter Options:
        NVidia,ATI,S3,Intel

        First Sound Card Options:
        Turtle,Roland,Creative,CM8032,Intel,Via , NVidia,AMD ,...
        Second Sound Card Options:
        Turtle,Roland,Creative,CM8032,Intel,Via, NVidia,AMD ,...

        IDE Driver Options:
        VIA,NVidia,Intel,AMD,...

        As you start making the list of combinations, be careful, and make sure there are drivers for all combinations from the major manufacturers. Also, remember, there can be more than one of most cards.

        You
        • Hmm... you forgot some here. Here's a revised list:

          Graphics:
          nVidia, ATI, Intel, S3, Matrox, 3dlabs (I know, the last two aren't exactly common on the target audience's computers, but you want it to work on those)
          The "nvidia" driver supports ALL nVidia cards from the driver's introduction back, the ATI driver supports all ATI cards from the Radeon 8500 and FireGL 8700 on (earlier cards are supposedly supported by DRI or Utah-GLX drivers), the Intel cards are supported by (AFAIK) a DRI driver, the S3 cards a
          • I'm sure I've forgotten more than a few as I am just spouting the names from Cache RAM. The issue isn't wether they are supported, as Linux has quickly been gaining support for a lot of major hardware, but instead how big a DVD set would be required to support at boot all the possible combinations.

            For example, one system I have has a NVidia GeForce MX400 video, ATI Radeon PCI second video, Creative PCI 512 Sound, NVidia AC97 Sound, 2 different USB Game controllers (Saitek and Microsoft), NVidia NForce chip
            • Hmm... Accurate and fast, maybe?

              BTW, my computer would not do any of the three, being this:

              Pentium MMX 233MHz
              Biostar MB8500TTD (i430TX chipset)
              PNY nVidia Riva TNT2 Model 64 32MB PCI
              ESS AudioDrive ES1868 ISA
              Belkin RTL8139-based 10/100 card (PCI)
              Some 56K ISA WinModem (didn't know they made ISA WinModems)
              Some no-name USB 1.1 PCI card, uses OHCI drivers
              • BTW, on drivers, here's what I know works, and what handles it:

                Everything on the chipset, various drivers
                The video card, latest ForceWare drivers for Linux
                Sound card, standard SB support
                Network card, 8139too
                USB card, usb-ohci
        • You also forgot this:

          Super nVidia Geforce17 4,000,000FX to be released in 2008.

          Even if you DID include drivers for every known graphics/sound card, what happens when a new card is released AFTER the game comes out???

          The reason that this works with game consoles is that they do not have new hardware added. When a game console is updated, they slap an entirely new label on it and make new games just for it. You do not even get ANY backward compatability unless it is designed in on purpose.

  • Drivers? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by schmink182 ( 540768 ) <schmink182 AT yahoo DOT com> on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @10:33PM (#8924907) Homepage
    I would think a large factor in the decision against making games on bootable CDs is that the companies would have to provide a lot of drivers: for video, sound, networking - you name it. Even with basic drivers, people couldn't use there gaming machines to their full capability without the installed drivers from nVidia and ATI. To the game publishers, it's much easier to release a game for PS2, GameCube, or XBox.

    • Re:Drivers? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by smallfries ( 601545 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @06:16AM (#8926937) Homepage
      Not to mention scalability. At the moment if you install an older game on some newer hardware then it can talk to it fine through DirectX or OpenGL and the game runs quicker. So that old game suddenly runs at a higher resolution than it used to.

      If you freeze the version of DirectX/OpenGL by burning it onto the disk then this can't happen, and if you have a card newer than the game then chances are it won't be supported by the old drivers.
    • What about a USB memory dongle?
      They sell memory cards for consoles, it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to have a USB memory stick with your system's drivers on it and space for save games. You could also load up game patches onto it that would apply when the game loads.

      This opens up a new can of worms in terms of game hacking, but I don't think it's that far fetched.

      Something like this might help to establish standards for kernel modules. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to download one driver that ope

  • More than one game? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nice2Cats ( 557310 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @10:36PM (#8924921)
    I started my usual game today, again, but I hope to be finished soon:

    After the Creation, the cruel god Moloch rebelled against the authority of Marduk the Creator. Moloch stole from Marduk the most powerful of all the artifacts of the gods, the Amulet of Yendor, and he hid it in the dark cavities of Gehennom, the Under World, where he now lurks, and bides his time.

    Once I find the amulet and complete Nethack, I might take a look at those other games. I've heard about this thing called PacMan that seems to be quite popular with the young crowd...

    • FYI, Pac-man is older than Nethack.

      Both Pac-man and Rogue came out in 1980. Nethack is a "Rogue-like" game that came out in 1987 (as a fork of Hack, I believe). By this time, the world had already grown to know Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Baby Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, Super Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man, Pac & Pal, Professor Pac-man, and Pac-Land. Pac-mania is Nethack's contemporary in age.

  • Um. Please. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PylonHead ( 61401 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @10:36PM (#8924927) Homepage Journal
    Autodetect hardware? A technical support nightmare. It's hard enough getting your game installed and working on the variety of hardware out there in the world, and thats with the operating system in place as an abstration layer between you and the different systems.

    You don't want to be responsible for getting the Operating System to install as well. Madness!

  • I was wondering too (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mnmn ( 145599 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @10:39PM (#8924945) Homepage
    and then I realized, part of the issue is standard drivers are not bundled with bootable CDs for damn legal issues.

    Knoppix is the best one for hardware detection, but uses the nv driver which is not accelerated, and nVidia for some reason wont allow redist of their nvidia drivers. Same is true of ATI and others. I dont know if there are binary drivers from creative and others for linux,

    DirectX is still relevant. Too many companies have invested in DirectX rendering and cannot just move their sources to OpenGL. For now theyre stuck with win32 and XBox, but with enough games released using opengl under Linux, the momentum will weigh towards Linux. Right now we just have to line up and cuss at Sierra for refusing to release halflife linux binaries.

    • Re:I was wondering too (Score:2, Informative)

      by floamy ( 608691 )
      Not true. Gentoo's UT2003 and UT2004 gamecd uses the binary NVIDIA drivers. The license that came witht he drivers also specifically allows redistribution, even repackaging.

  • Why (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hythlodaeus ( 411441 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @10:42PM (#8924965)
    Why isn't it done? Because most people would feel inconvenienced by having to reboot, but only a few people become aroused at everything involving Linux.

  • I would think (Score:3, Insightful)

    by aztektum ( 170569 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @10:45PM (#8924979)
    ...the size of modern games keeps this from happening with CD's.

    Consoles use DVD's or similar technologies to cram as much on a disc as possible, but with huge hard drives out there, you have the option of installing 3-4 GB of stuff and not using up all the space.

    Still with DVD-ROMs being fairly common on new PC's it's more feasible. The only other downside I can see is longer load times. (Still probably not as bad as consoles)

    One thing I just thought of, console games are written to one specific set of hardware. You'd have to cram an awful lot of drivers on there to support a wide enough array of hardware.

    I can't see why it WOULDN'T work, or at least couldn't be made to.
    • Replying to myself -- ooh the humanity

      This could have an adverse impact on the modding scene. Unless a company releases a modding SDK that you install and use it to burn a bootable disk with the requisite files.

  • Horrible idea. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Chester K ( 145560 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @10:53PM (#8925027) Homepage
    it would make DirectX and Microsoft irrelevant
    Does anyone if the major game studios have plans on doing something similar, or if not, the reasons why they aren't?

    Why would they? DirectX is a very powerful set of APIs that there's no real equal to on Linux yet (it's more than just Direct3D, you know), and by including the entire OS as part of the game, you're hurting your forward compatibility for everyone except people technically savvy enough to recompile a new kernel and burn a new bootable CD with drivers for newer hardware.

  • Access to other stuff (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SteveX ( 5640 ) * on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @10:57PM (#8925046) Homepage
    If I'm playing a game and someone sends me an instant message, I can pause the game and talk to them if I like..

    If I receive an email, I can check on it and maybe respond if it warrants it.

    Turning my PC into a console takes away my ability to do this stuff.
    • This is, of course, much easier with multimonitor.

      I happily IRC away while playing games, barring a few games which *really* dislike alt-tab.

      This isn't an Amiga, you don't get away with taking over my system.

  • Because almost nobody would use them? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dark Nexus ( 172808 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @10:57PM (#8925049)
    I can see this being a good idea for places like gaming cafes, but that's about it. For personal computers? There just isn't a big enough market for it.

    I had a dual boot Linux/Windows system for the games that don't have Linux versions and don't play well with Wine, and just found myself booting to Windows ALL the time, because rebooting to play a game was too much hassle. I eventually removed Linux because I was always in Windows anyway.

    Then you run into other problems, like perhiperal support. Neither my sound card, nor the 3d portion of my video card work out of the box with any distro I've tried. I've got common hardware on that front - SB Live and GeForce 4. Sure, neither took much work to get working properly, but if they don't work out of the box, they won't work for a bootable games. Then there's network cards - it was easier for me to switch network cards than to get the one that was already in my system working. Hardware support just is not bulletproof enough, and the large number of drivers needed to make sure all the necessary hardware works would be space restrictive. Bootable DVDs, maybe.

    Then there's the issue of saving games, patching the software, downloadable content, etc. I'm sure there's ways around some of those issues, but they're big enough barriers for this to not make corporate sense.

  • You obviously never played a DOS game, did you? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Quarters ( 18322 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @11:00PM (#8925069)
    I remember when SVGA Air Warrior shipped, circa 1992 or 1993--first game I ever worked on. It was one of the very first SVGA games to come out. It shipped on quite a few 3.5" floppies. A lot of that space was eaten up by close to forty (40!) different video drivers and an equal number of sound card drivers. There was no auto-detection, so if you didn't know the exact hardware configuration of your machine you could easily screw up the install and end up with a game that either worked poorly or not at all. It was the Dark Ages of PC gaming. The Amiga was a far superior gaming platform because it was closed hardware and therefore developers could concentrate on the game and not on the spit and bailing wire to make the game work.

    DirectX is extremely relevant. It puts a nice abstraction layer out there so that game developers no longer have to worry about supporting every freaking darned obscure piece of PC hardware that might exist. I honestly believe that if DirectX hadn't come along the driver situation would've spiraled out of control and PC gaming would've died a long long time ago. It'd be console gaming or nothing right now.

    No user in there right mind wants to reboot their machine all of the time to play a game. Developer's don't want to be hamstrung with driver nightmare and only 650MBs (minus space for an OS and drivers) of space.

    • Developer's don't want to be hamstrung with driver nightmare and only 650MBs (minus space for an OS and drivers) of space.

      Aside from your misuse of the apostrophe (the plural does not use an apostrophe), I'd like to point out your flagrant mischaracterization of a CD's capacity: "only 650MB." This is the problem with games today: cram more crap into the CD to make up for the fact that it's basically a recycled game. You see it in the movies, too: special effects to compensate (they don't) for the lack of

  • Missing a few obvious faults (Score:5, Informative)

    by obeythefist ( 719316 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @11:06PM (#8925098) Journal
    You could quite conceivably do this. You could effectively turn a PC into a mediocre abnormal console by using a bootable CD to apply an O/S and then execute the game.

    But just because you can do something doesn't make it a good idea.

    Here are the flaws:

    1) This is advocating using Linux for gaming on a PC. Linux is a great O/S in that it's open, free, and functional. But it has never, ever exceeded Windows in terms of gaming performance, even for OpenGL games that have optimisations for Linux. Linux doesn't have any API's that get close to the tight HAL/driver/API system that Windows uses so smoothly. Ahh, you say, but a bootable linux CD would be streamlined to run the game! Less overhead! This is true. But you'd also have more overhead because, as you know, Knoppix doesn't run nearly as tight as a properly optimised Linux install because it needs to be robust rather than sleek for compatibility purposes.

    2) The reboot factor that people have mentioned

    3) Windows XP boot time on my system at home: ~15 seconds. Redhat boot time on my system at home: ~20-30 seconds. Knoppix CD boot time on my system at home: ~120 seconds.

    4) The no-patching problem that people have mentioned

    5) Hardware support. There was another thread recently that mentioned the good, but not excellent hardware support under Linux. It's always getting better, but it's still not perfect.

    Having said all this, once Linux starts supporting DirectX, there will most likely be a full scale revolt amongst gamers against the beast of Redmond. It's good to dream, isn't it?
    • Hardware support. There was another thread recently that mentioned the good, but not excellent hardware support under Linux. It's always getting better, but it's still not perfect.

      Even if it is good, how will the game support hardware released after the game goes gold? Better let the OS support that.

    • I only use Linux and I've never believed that a bootable game CD would fly. However, your point about being unable to patch games is one of the most convincing I've seen (I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere) so I'm adding it to my smack-down arsenal. It really should be #1 on your list. I also feel that people don't want to reboot. Sure it doesn't take long to do, but it's still a pain in the arse and because of that people will resist it.

      Now, as for frame rates, when it comes to OpenGL on nVIDIA cards
      • Ahh, a set of API's that would allow PS/2 games to run seamlessly on Linux. That would be a coup, allright.

        But, let's run with this idea, if Sony were to decide there was some profit in making such API's, how would they do it?

        The problem with open sourcing the APIs is that it's next to impossible to stop microsoft or anyone else from adapting it to work with a different O/S. Sony's not the kind of company to embrace "open" anyway. Just look at how much proprietary they pump out!

        So that means you'll pr
        • Yep, you framed the problem with the Sony "option" perfectly. There's not much of a good samaritan incentive for Sony to release an open source version of it's hypothetical gaming API for Linux.

          I'm going to head off on a "perfect scenario" tangent that could lead to just that situation. First, we take the however improbable assumption that the PS3 uses Linux, Sony would need to release any kernel mods to abide by the GPL. Second, Sony takes a page from MS's book and uses code signing for it's console (it
        • I believe that Dosbox will play most PS/2 games... or did you mean PS2?
  • Instead of providing your ISP's account info/config only once, do it for every game? No.
    • Look at it this way, consoles are just like a smaller variety of PCs, each (Xbox/PS1/PS2/GC/DC) has it's own cd-rom drive, proccessor, motherboard, grahpics and sound chips, an operating system (though not as useable as on the PC) and DirectX-like grahpics/sound handling layers.

      When the game developer makes a game, hm...which console(/OS?) should I make this for? a descision is made to make it for the PS2, the developer imidiatly knows that the PS2 has such and such parts, CPU, mobo, etc.

      Imagine each p
  • For the last time (I swear) if you want to use your PC like a console just buy a friggin' XBOX. It reboots whenever you swap discs and it doesn't need driver updates or swap space and you can slap it on a 61" LCD television.

    I'm even worse: my XBOX is plugged into my PC's video capture card so I can play a quick game on the same screen as whatever 'work' I promised myself I'd finish. The best part ? The game alawys runs, rarely crashes if ever, and uses up NO cpu power.

    Thank you, Goodnight!
  • This was discussed on slashdot a little while ago. The short version is that OSes ultimately run on some sort of hardware. Up-to-date hardware detection and utilisation is hard to do and in the real world only big companies like MS have the resources and $$ to make sure that every little graphics card, audio card, input device, network card etc work as promised for everyone.

    Yes, most hardware works most of the time on Linux but it doesn't have anywhere near the coverage as windows. Hence windows provides a

  • It's true that when playing UT2004 I shut down everything else before playing, but I don't *have* to--and in 3 or 4 years, when I feel like breaking out the game my rig will be able to handle the game in its sleep, in a small window while I surf the web, etc. I like that choice.

    If bootable games became big, what would be the difference between my computer and an XBox? Answer: none, except the XBox boots faster.

    Given that, I'd prefer my computer games to run on computers and my console games to be console

  • DUH (Score:2)

    by alienw ( 585907 )
    Two words: hardware support. If that isn't a criterion, you might as well skip the operating system and just write code that runs on the bare hardware. Besides, what would be the goddamn point? That is one of the stupidest ideas I have ever heard.
  • How am I going to save my game?

    Am I going to have to have a special partition on the harddrive or will the disc be ready to dump save-games in some file on whatever filesystem I might be running? I could be running some pretty interesting filesystems...

    Sure I could use a USB drive to save my games... Is that where I'm supposed to save all the game patches and whatever proxy settings I might need to play the game online?

    Surely you'll want the game to remember settings for that computer that you've persona
  • If you want to know the honest truth, its because a linux liveCD isn't worth the investment of programmers time it would take to create. Game companies don't have unlimited time and money, and spending either on something as unrelated to the game as added overhead. Game developers cost a decent amount of money and not one dollar more will be spent than necessary.

  • Some good reasons. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by _aa_ ( 63092 ) <j&uaau,ws> on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @12:34AM (#8925623) Homepage Journal
    1) The operating system would take up a significant amount of space on the disc.
    2) A read-only filesystem makes saving preferences, screenshots, etc. difficult
    3) Extreme variances in architectures and hardware would limit the playability.
    4) Liscense violations against non-free components (nvidia).
    5) Slow load times.
    6) Game patches and updates would require the download of an entire new disc.
    7) CD/DVDs deteriorate rapidly. Constant inserts/removals can lead to irreversible damage.

    Just to name a few.

    • Red herrings. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Inoshiro ( 71693 )
      "1) The operating system would take up a significant amount of space on the disc."

      Linux takes maybe 120-200mb. That's talking about a kernel (1mb) plus a basic set of OpenGL + X + X driver for cards. That's not much of a 4.5 or 9gb disc. It'd be even less if there was actual work on making it into a standard.

      "2) A read-only filesystem makes saving preferences, screenshots, etc. difficult"

      My PS2 and GameCube and PS1 and Dreamcast, etc, all seem to save fine. I can get a 16mb USB dongle for 16$ CDN. W
      • You make some valid points supporting PlayStations. But I have a PC, with a hard disk, and I paid a lot of money for it. I already have an operating system I like just fine. I don't want to buy a USB "Dongle". I might want to pause my game to check my email. If I wanted to sit and wait while my game loads, I'd use a c64.

        My friend, what happens when the latest and greatest new video card comes out and none of your video games support it? Do you throw all your games away and start buying new ones?

        The en

        • The entire point of PCs is that they are upgradable (and not just by buying a bigger "Dongle"). Console gaming systems are standardized. I suggest you stick with them.

          I would stick with consoles, but I have no way of running code on a GameCube, Xbox, or PS2, without breaking laws that could get me in jail and my backside sexually assaulted.

          • You can buy a PS2 linux dev kit, you can get the Sega network boot disc (labeled phantasy star online) on the gamecube, or you can do that no modchip thing with the xbox.

      • Linux takes maybe 120-200mb. That's talking about a kernel (1mb) plus a basic set of OpenGL + X + X driver for cards. That's not much of a 4.5 or 9gb disc. It'd be even less if there was actual work on making it into a standard.
        Try closer to 250 MB minimum for a working install, probably more, like in the 300 range. More, if you assume a person might need a web-browser, or things like that as well. And a kernel with a full modules tree is more like 10 MB.

        My PS2 and GameCube and PS1 and Dreamcast, etc

        • "Try closer to 250 MB minimum for a working install, probably more, like in the 300 range. More, if you assume a person might need a web-browser, or things like that as well."

          No. No browser is needed, no QT is needed, no GTK+ is needed. Only the game binaries, OpenGL, a set of drivers for the most common 3D cards, X, and a kernel. Slackware can run in 250mb with a full OS. You need way less as a base for 1 gaming program which is the sole application.

          "That take space. (sic) Most games need on the orde
      • Can you say "I've got a perfectly good hard disk in my PC"? You might as well buy a XBox/PS2/GameCube/Whatever

        Right... so lets say I've bought the latest whizzbang card from nVidia... I want to play my game from last year which unfortunately doesn't support my new card. What do I do now?

        Okay, fair enough, we'll make them backwards compatible. Does this mean we'll be forever locked into a particular hardware platform? Will hardware manufacturers be forever forced to insert huge pieces of compatibility
        • It's called OpenGL. It lets me run Quake1 on my Radeon 9800.

          Yes, OpenGL would be on these discs. It'd be stupid to not have an abstraction layer.

          Did you even read my post before replying? I've addresses all these strawmen about drivers.

          " Can you say "I've got a perfectly good hard disk in my PC"? You might as well buy a XBox/PS2/GameCube/Whatever"

          If there's an HD we want to use, it'll have to be in a standard layout. Since you probably want your own config for GP use of your PC, you'll want to use t
          • I did read your post but you're not getting the point of mine (or I'm not getting yours)

            At the moment you've got this:

            Graphics Card Hardware specific drivers OpenGL/DirectX abstraction layer Games

            The OpenGL/DirectX abstraction layer is part of the big driver bundle you download from nVidia or ATI. You still need the lower level driver which actually talks to the hardware itself. The Radeon 9800 does not talk OpenGL natively.

            Saying you'll have OpenGL on your CD is good and all but you still need som
            • "Saying you'll have OpenGL on your CD is good and all but you still need something to talk to the hardware."

              I mentioned it as a package with catalyst/detonator for the nVidia/ATI cards, since those tend to be the 2 most-common gaming cards. I mentioned in another post how you could easily have another dongle that holds the driver. So you have 1 save card for game data and 1 card for a driver than translates OGL to the hw layer.

              Make sense?
  • I still think an EOS would be a better solution. Then again, those are already found in game consoles.
  • On the subject of cross-platform games, I'm rather surprised more ambitious games have not been released in Flash. You can't put together a MMOFPS or something, but it seems that you could assemble a SNES-grade RPG or something similar. The budget would be tiny and the game would run on nearly any modern PC. Why isn't this kind of thing done more? It seems like the only things I've seen done in Flash are three-minute diversions.

  • Because it's a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:23AM (#8925891) Journal
    I can't figure out why so many Slashdotters seem stuck on the merits of this idea.

    Here are a couple of reasons why this is a bad idea:

    * Complete lack of forward-compatibility with hardware (huge -- effectively kills the idea, and the reason why this scheme works in the console world with a standard set of hardware but not in the computer world).

    * Forced rebooting and no other apps running

    * Poor access times

    * No patches

    Basically, even if you overcame all the obstacles, you'd have little more than an expensive console (abeit with a lot of RAM), but without the standardized hardware and input devices that benefit console developers.

    The benefits of the PC are pretty much different from those of the console. Trying to turn a PC into a poor copy of a console is just a bad idea. Leverage the strengths of the PC -- more memory, big, fast writeable storage devices, keyboard and mouse input devices (many buttons, good text-input capabilities, rapid and precise aiming), very commonly available network access, forwards compatibility, patchability, game extensibility, good toolkits -- widget sets and the like -- for producing things like editors.
  • Well. I do not like the idea of rebooting etc. at all. Also the "auto-detecting" of hardware would be less than great. Having a game fit on a single CD/DVD wouldn't be the best either and there would be speed issues. However, maybe there is a hybrid choice. You'd still need to reboot and it would auto-detect your hardware in the sense that, it looks up your existing configuration and uses that as it's starting point. Using this method you could utilize all of the computers resources towards the game
  • Once again, wishing there was a Troll score for a story... this one certainly deserves it.

    Do I really need to restate the extremely valid reasons mentioned by virtually all replies so far?

    A better question is, WHY would any company do that? Is there ANY possible business case for increasing your QA budget tenfold, and possibly doubling your development budget? Not to mention the extra hassle customers would be faced with in this case.

    There's reinventing the wheel, and then there's shooting yourself in

  • I have seen these! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tolldog ( 1571 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @03:36AM (#8926452) Homepage Journal
    My friend has one.

    Its called an xbox.

    I really, really don't like rebooting my computer.
    It bugs me that FFXI takes up my full screen.
    I want to be able to multi-task.

    If I want to reduce the usefullness of my desktop to a console system, I will just get a console and games. Its cheaper and I know they will work together.

    Now if only these systems that booted into games plugged into normal household entertainment systems. I would love to be able to put this system in my living room, maybe get a few controllers, hook it up to my stereo and tv...

    -Tim
  • Now *there's* a rubbish idea.

    1) Take an OS that's worse at running games than the one that most people have on their computer
    2) Put it on a bootable CD along with the game, takes forever to boot, has slim chance of finding right drivers, savegames are a problem
    3) ?
    4) Profit my arse!
  • Why can't companies supply a USB stick for save games / config / driver updates / HD Info (for use as storage), etc, etc. For the amount a game costs to buy retail, they SHOULD supply some value addon. As an aside, it could be used as a type of 'dongle' - no USB, no play. The speed of the CDrom drive is the only barrier I can see. This could be negated by storing some highly used files on the HD - config stored on the you guessed it USB stick. I know this sort of defeats the purpose of having the whole thi
    • So now to play a game, rather than clicking on an icon (or whatever), I'm going to have to find the CD, and I'm going to have to find the dongle, and I'm going to have to reboot? And for the priviledge of doing this I'm going to have to pay more (the company will have to make back the cost of the dongle somehow)?
    • Heck, why not distribute games on USB sticks to begin with?

  • OS independent does not imply reboot (Score:3, Insightful)

    by LarsWestergren ( 9033 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @06:02AM (#8926896) Homepage Journal
    There are alternatives to rebooting if you want to play.Javagaming [java.net]
    LWJGL [lwjgl.org]
    • Damn, why did I have to read ALL THE WAY DOWN to the score:2's to find this? Everything above is the same stuff: Rebooting sucks, back drivers and hardware support. The end. Mod this sucker up! OS independent games? Use an OS independent language to write them!

      • OS independent games? Use an OS independent language to write them!

        The problem here is that developers are too familiar with the Direct3D and OpenGL models to change to Java 3D, which has a rather different architecture. In addition, do popular Java platform VMs implement the Java 3D API?

        • do popular Java platform VMs implement the Java 3D API?

          Yes, in fact, most J2ME VMs support Java3D (like a good deal of handhelds have Java3D games).
  • Why not pick the OS that most games are developed for right now for this theoretical idea? I know linux sells better in nerdland, but the majority of games aren't made for it yet. This suggestion still ties you into an OS, it's just harder to see.
  • This idea isn't as bad as everone says it is. Patching and junk is possible. And havving no other programs running, I fail to see how that is bad. 1) So much less ram is being used. 2) Developer can do so much more knowing that nothing will stop him. 3) If you F up your computer Direcx or any other part of your computer it still will run the games. I would love the idea of a GAMING OS, while it would be a boot OS, it would have HD parts, so correct drivers and such are not a problem. The 1 and ONLY probl
  • The idea has promise. However, not in the manner you suggest.

    Linux, for all its advantages is just the wrong OS for this sort of thing. It's far too complex for something that will only be used for playing games. It takes up a lot of space, and takes a long time to load.

    The other issue that people have mentioned, is hardware compatibility. Actually, this is probably only an issue when it comes to graphics cards. Most other hardware has some sort of fallback compatibility mode.

    While we can ass

  • Answer is in the post if you look carefully. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by biglig2 ( 89374 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @09:12AM (#8927841) Homepage Journal
    You answer it yourself in the post.

    Basically, you mention only one reason why bootable CD games are a good thing; because it means "no Microsoft or Direct X".

    Firstly, that's so not a comercial reason to do anything.

    Secondly, look at Quake 3 for an example of how you can easily make a game that doesn't care about Microsoft (OpenGL, a Linux and a Mac client) without all the pain of making a console boot disk.
  • Wouldn't it make more sense to have open libraries that are operating system independent, for more than just video? Sort of like Java meets open GL.

    Also keep in mind that your Linux boot won't support Apple hardware, unless it's a dual boot disk or something, but I don't even know if that's possible.
  • They're are called "board" games

  • Security? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jubitzu ( 750748 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @09:36PM (#8935383)
    The operating system provides some security for your data on your hard disk and other things (let's not start a windows security argument here). It would have to be a pretty damned trustworthy game developer for me to give them total access to my computer without any protection.

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