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Bootable Game CDROMs Using Linux
Bill Kendrick writes "Want to play a cool Linux game but don't want to bother installing that pesky OS? Yamamori Takenori has translated his
"Linux CD-ROM Game System" to English. It's a step-by-step demonstration of how to burn a game, and just the necessary parts of Linux, onto a PC-bootable CDROM. (Original
Japanese version available too, of course.)"
now we wait for cool games?
This is wickedly cool. I've always wondered if this was doable. Now if there were only more games...
I mean really, are there any cool Linux games that aren't available for Windows (which I assume is the installed operating system they're referring to, if instead you're doing this on your Novell 5 server, I salute you!).
The only games I can think of that aren't available for Windows are some of the BSD ones, and you can play those in a telnet session to that old 486 that you turned into a Linux box (though my 486 is a FreeBSD box, uptime of 260 days last time I checked, and that was because we had a power failure.).
Now if only I could do this for my windoze games... Just think about it, I could keep Unreal Tournament and Half Life and free up a whole 'nother harddrive being monopolized (excuse the pun) by some other OS....
But I don't quite get the point. See, I don't keep up with all the Linux stuff, but are there really any games out there that have been released for Linux that aren't on the PC already?
Is a game produced in this manner more 'stable' than the same game straight for the PC?
And would this count as a Linux 'emulator'?
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
This would be really cool for playing games on a Linux port of the various game consoles. Does anyone know much about Linux ports to the various popular game consoles?
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
The benefit of course, as this points out, is that you only load what you need, and the rest is pure gaming power. Perhaps MS could even follow suit with some sort of boot-cd interface to use your configuration, but only put into memory what needs to be there (er... well I guess I doubt MS would ever get that mindset, but hey...)
What a great concept tho.
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wouldnt this do more to harm the linux movement et al. ? We are supposed to be waving the flag saying 'hey, install linux, we got cool games etc etc.' Now what incentive do people have to become regular linux users if all they have to do is just boot off a cdrom? If we are to be true linux supporters, then I dont think we should support this idea....
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
That's made me think.
Used to do this with win 3.1 boot dos from a floppy to leave enough memeory for the lastest games.
Could this be done? Only possible flaw I could seewould be with the size of most Windows games now days, what about using this type of thing to play DVD's?
Coul you use one CD OS one CD app? (assuming 2 cd drives?)
I've proberly missed something becasue its after lunch and I'm sleepy.
OK, presuming it all works as detailed (and I don't see any reason why it can't thus far) why didn't anyone think of this before? What a brilliant hack. It might not be very fast without unusually heavy use of memory (after all there is a reason a lot of games copy stuff to the hard drive) but still, it's a really cool idea. Even is a nice way to let people (like your kids) play games or use other applications while maintaining a secure system in the process. Nice...
One of the things that keeps me from playing games is the way they like to put files EVERYWHERE (and not just little ones, either). But do they really need to use the harddrive for this? Why can't I play ALL games from the CD with no install?
--
An abstained vote is a vote for Bush and Gore.
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Want to run that Linux game without installing the pesky OS? Here's an idea: Buy the Windows version! The Windows version will be out at least a year before the Linux port. The Windows version will be more supported by the manufacturer. The Windows version will not require you to recompile an X server to get better 3D graphics performance -- it will use proven, fast graphics drivers.
Why compromise? If you're going to pay money for those games of yours, at least have the good graces to play them on the fastest, most well-supported gaming platform there is for PC gaming.
For more information, click here.
This would be a great way to open the development market for console game. All we would need is a kernel port and drivers for the custom hardware. Then any ubergeek could write console games without needing an (ultra)expensive development system. Dreamcast & Playstation2 are the obvious choices but is Microsoft unwittingly building a potential Linux "thin client" with the X-Box?
But I don't want to buy a copy of Window just to play games. Linux is free (as in beer).
If you are already running Linux, what do you need a bootable Linux CD/game for?
This is for people who are already running another OS and want to try a Linux game.
Well, I can't see why anyone would want to use Linux just to play games, since the graphics are slower than Windows. BeOS otoh would be v cool (whenever the new opengl comes out of beta).
klagg
Free GPL Java Mobile Tetris game: Jamos
Unreal Tournament runs on Linux now. www.lokigames.com
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try."
Wow this is great! Now I can play all the GNOME and KDE games that came with red hat! Wait why the heck would i make a bootable CD when I have Linux installed? And of course Linux doesn't have any cool games. I think this guy is thinking a bit backwards here. There aren't any people who have Windows and want to run Linux games. It's the other way around. However, would this same system work for getting other applications besides games to work?
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
you don't have as much room left on the cd as you would have had without the OS
you can't save games (of course you can do that on the harddisk of the host, but not with the game)
everytime you boot, you need to set your preferences by hand...
aren't consoles supposed to be like this?
I think it could protentially be quite useful, because this way game manufacturers wouldn't have to produce a "Linux version" or a "Windows version", they would just produce a generic PC version.
They could make a game that you put in the CD drive and boot from - the average user would neither know nor care that there is a Linux kernel booting off the CD drive to run his game. Joe Sixpack who plays such games treats them like putting a CD into a PlayStation and turning it on - he simply puts the game CD in his new whizzy games PC and boots it.
However, this situation would probably require the inclusion of lots of graphics and sound card drivers on the CD, and a completely automatic hardware detection routine that could boot the correct drivers up. But once such things are written, gamers could be using their PC like they use their consoles - just boot off the CD. OS? What OS? :)
this is a Really Good Idea.
Why? Even if you hate linux, a stripped down operating system streamlined for games doesn't require as much resource overhead, and therefore will run smoother.
Now, my opinion is that Microsoft should look more into creating a stripped down OS for the desktop, rather than repackaging the PC with the X-Box. Then, if you wanted anything else (joy stick port, TV out, etc) MS could release addons for it, rather than making you pay the full price for a castrated PC. IT'd be cheaper, and run well too. (I do recognize the fact that you could run into problems being that PC's aren't as standardized and self contained, but I think we could get around that)
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
We can already buy game consoles. Why turn our pc into one? I like the fact that i can minimize my games and go chat or do something else without having to restart the game or my computer. I don't want to have to turn it off to play a game. This might help for those with slower machines that can't handle all the background services and the game, but really i don't need to worry about that. I need my uptime especially since I run servers (ftp or web) alot of the time. I paid alot of money for my computer and I'm not turning it into a glorified game console. I can get one of those for 200 bucks.
Why is it that everyone seems to think that this is a good idea? Remember how long it took you to get your favorite sound card/video card/joystick/other piece of hardware working under Linux? Now imagine having to go through that for every game that you want to play. And to top it off, you can't save your changes to the configuration without burning a new CD.
Don't get me wrong, Linux is a great OS, but the type of hardware used in games happens to be the hardware that is most lacking in Linux support (it IS getting better, but slowly). It's okay to have to wrestle with manually patching drivers for some weird brand sound card into the kernel because the patch is for a different version or doesn't work quite right, but I only want to have to go through that once please...
There's no way that a single OS image can anticipate every possible hardware configuration without having to tweak anything. Even Windoze often can't do plug-and-pray good enough for that to work. This is why they invented consoles.
`dont forget that Linux became only possible because 20 years of OS research was carefully studied, analyzed, discussed and thrown away.' -- mingo on linux-kernel
Honestly, though, the real draw of this story is that someone has taken the time to do it. Maybe it'll start a trend of people booting CDROMs to play their favorite games (just like the old days, eh?).
It's for the developers, dummy.
Something like this allows the developers to control the entire envronment that the game runs in. They can tune scheduling, configure it as a realtime OS etc etc.
The downside is that they have to include drivers for *everything*. The upside is that they can make sure they are installed correctly and *work*.
Deleted
I'm amazed at how many people are slamming this like it's a crappy idea. Shame on you!
The benefit here is that a) it's something that hasn't been done on home cmoputers in years (bootable games), and b)was enabled because of linux.
The reason to do this is *not* to 'avoid installing linux'. Think of it as... you are a game developer.. you want a completely open API for games.. you write your game for linux.. but oh, you want that big marketshare. Now the game has been reduced to a 'bootable' game. Nevermind that it uses linux, that fact may even be hidden from the end user.
Oh, and of course, linux afficiandos can install it regularly and play it as well.
Now I can play all those great games for Linux only on my Windows box without having to setup a dual-boot! Wait, I forgot, the only reason I run Windows is for the games anyway...
Wouldn't be possible if the game uses any COM components. The components have to be registered on your system. I wonder if it'd be possible to temporarily create the necessary reg entries to point to the appropriate object factories on the CD-ROM. Hmmmmm...
My first guess is it wouldn't be possible for most games though. MS probably doesn't want it to be either. After all, if you're going to boot Windows from a CD and run a game on it, you're going to need to agree to the EULA which pops up AFTER you boot from the CD, and pay a nice licensing fee...
This was done frequently with PC games.
5 1/4 inch floppy based games were self bootable. Being so young at the time i don't know the technical details. I would bet they didn't use DOS (perhaps some propritary o/s?), since when games moved to DOS microsoft would have had a fuss about redistributing pieces of the o/s on a selfbootable game.
Anyone know the tech details of these self boot game of yore?
See, we need this, but the CD needs to boot Windows, not linux.
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GetSystemMetrics(SM_SECURE) == FALSE
This doesn't sound like it would be very useful. First, you would have to make this for your own personal use so the drivers matched your system. It isn't like they could see these things off the shelf or anything. Secondly, you would have to re-write the cd every time a new driver came out. Thirdly, who plays just a game and then leaves the computer. I'm always surfing or checking my email. With this, I would have to boot up once to play the game, then again after that was all done. Seems like a huge pain to me....
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in a world without bounderies or fences, who needs Gates anyway?
Why reboot just to play a game ? I don't like the idea of turning my high-end PC into an expensive console. If I had nothing better to do with my PC than play games, I wouldn't have bought a PC, I'd have stuck with PSX/DC/N64 instead.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Those wondering that this would be useful for
doze games, are out of luck since DOS/doze need
to write to their boot device.
As for Linux boot CDs in general, a RAM disk
must be used for anything a harddisk would
be used for normally (for e.g. swap). So a requirement to use this effectively would be loadsa RAM.
Also initially reading data from the CD is
going to be slow, so loading big games will
be very slow.
Not ideal...
If you could get Microsoft to allow you to distribute Windows like that on the cheap, much less keep Windows within a reasonable memory footprint so the CD-ROM drive didn't need to be thrashed so hardly, it could be done, but I don't think either will happen because 1. M$ is greedy, and 2. MS is making the X-box, which precludes any other Windows based console options.
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"A witty saying proves nothing" - Voltaire
This would be much more useful if there were a windows counter-part!
c't once had a article about bootable Windows-CD, as far as I can remenber they used a Ramdisk to store the Registry. This would definitley be possible.
For those who read the (german) Magazine it can be found in c't 11/99 Page 206
Why is this a Bad Thing, I hear you ask. Let me explain: By offering games on a CD-rom, with a built in (bit of) operating system, you are dooming yourself to near certain incompatability with any bit of hardware that will be released after your game. You are forcing yourself to supply drivers for everything that has ever been built. You are also making your software impossible to patch and (perhaps worst of all) forcing users to run games straight from the CD. What on earth would a commercial party do with all of the support requests they'd end up receiving from people who can't get their game to run on their winchip / vanta / galaxysound combo with their Panther XL stick and their 3D glasses?
.umm. . .yeah.
Don't even get me started on the fact that people who would play these games wouldn't even _know_ they're using linux.
On the other hand, if a dedicated system were to be made for such games, with standardised hardware, It would be much easier to publish and support them. Perhaps a system with a built in TV-out that, by being built to specific standards, could be sold for a much lower price than a custom box.
Oh. .
I want the fire back.
I think you're missing the point. It's not to promote Linux as a game playing platform: it's using linux as a very small footprint on the top of which a game can play *and*nothing*else*
If you boot a machine off a cd-rom solely to play a game, all you need of the OS is the bits dedicated to making the game work. Happily with Linux you can knock all the extraneous parts out, leaving plenty of system resources for the game itself. Loading windows brings all sorts of irrelevent (in terms of playing the game) crap onto the system.
This is just neat system optimisation, and currently Linux is a nice, cheap, OS, simple way to do it. Nothing more
It makes sense for games guys to do it this way as suddenly there's no such thing as a Windows game or a Linux game or a, ahem, FreeBSD game, but rather just x86 games.
One step closer to migrating PCs into the Console Gaming market. Something more like the X-Box. Wouldn't surprise me. By the time the X-box comes out, we'll probably have cool Linux games, thus creating competition for it (as if the already existing console gaming systems weren't competition enough).
Also, right now, porting to Linux isn't worth it because the profit they turn for doing it barely covers the cost of producing it. This may tip the scales in that aspect aswell.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
When there are Linux only games that Windows users want to play. I can't imagine why, if you are a Linux user already you would want to reboot with a CD like this. Like I said the only use this caould have, that I see is for windows users. And if it is for windows users who's going to setup the system to be burnt for them? Or do they install and setup linux then mkisofs it and do the burn, and remove Linux and contiue using Windows.
Support for new hardware will definitely be lacking (as the hardware doesn't exists so the dirvers don't.)
In a couple years the games will be useless, unless these are just simple non-3d keyboard games...
Base System:
A small (loopback?) filesystem which autoconfigs hardware (or at least allows hardware settings to be saved to a floppy), mounts the thing to run-fs and exec's it
Thing to run:
A loopback filesystem on the CD which contains all the necessary files for this application (I.E. base configs, drivers, libraries, etc).
Build Tool:
A program that when given a directory, determines the library dependencies and packs it up into a loopback mountable fs.
Launch Tool:
This is basically the mount-exec part of the base system, but would run on any linux box. You could install the application's loopback filesystem to your hard disk and then run "./launch-me app.fs" to run the game/app/etc from your hard disk
This way the base OS (configuration, etc) is separate from the application, and provides a consistant platform.
Someone who was really enterprising would create a tiny "console-sized" Linux box that uses decent hardware. Then, game manufacturers could create bootable Linux versions of their games...Viola!
I'd buy it.
--SpookComix
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
Most of the games I like to play are windows games. I could do away completely with windows if it wasn't for the games (geez, I sound like an addict). I would much prefer this the other way around; give me a cd with windows games that I can play on linux. That way I don't have to have a seperate machine/partition just for windows.
The only problem I see here is that cdrom drives are much slower than hard drives (which is why those games load all the stuff onto your hard drive in the first place). This means that data flow becomes the bottle-neck. Still, it would be cool to have a windows game/os on cdrom with the only thing saved to the hard drive is saved games and config files.
Maybe its just me, but this seems a little too close to console gaming. I mean if I wanted to reboot my computer to play a game, what would really be the point of having computer games over console games. I kind of like the fact that if I need to I can stop my game and do other things. Keep my ICQ going check email. This only seems useful if you were really going to pick apart the OS and get some specialized processing power. But this is out of scope with most game designers as it would take too many resources to make it viable. Just my opinion
I'm going to love it!
:)
/. isn't that good enough!?
I've been using my boyfriend's computer all of the time lately to play games on linux and he keeps saying, "just think, you can play those all the time if you let me install linux on your computer." But, not having the capacity on my computer to run both (i don't think) i'm a little skeptical just yet... but if it ends up that i can play the games on windows...
He believes he will be the ultimate computer geek among his friends if he gets his girlfriend to start running linux, but for pity's sake, I'm already reading
Now... to convince him to burn the CD's for me...
The games I had on such disks included Winter Games, Summer Games, J-Bird, and a few others but I don't recall the names. Of course it was in spacy CGA graphics with awesome buzzer-audio-systsem(tm) making funny noises.
I must be getting old :-)
For games game-on-CD-and-don't-bother abstraction would be great, but as someone already pointed out it will be hard to provide compatibility for all hardware.
Even worse, you may have upgraded to the fancy newest 3D card and the game you bought 3 months ago won't work anymore just because of that. It would really suck, don't you think?
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
So where does it say that you don't have any hard drive at all? The point isn't not to use the hard drive, but simply not to have to install a not-of-your-choice OS on it to play a game. There is a problem with the hard drive having a file system supported by the OS on the CD-ROM, but Linux has support for a lot more filesystems than Windoze does.
What is needed is some standard way to put drivers on a hard drive where the CD-ROM's OS can load them in a "plug and play" sort of way. Besides, you need a hard drive to store configuration info and game saves anyhow.
And not all games will necessarily even care about drivers. If the game can run in 640x480x16 VGA with no networking, or even a mostly standard 256 color SVGA mode, it won't care about drivers.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
UT dies run on linux, you can convert you windows CD
And who's to say that there's not a market for a self hosting version of rogue?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
What else can I say... Takenori-san; Doomo arigatoo gozaimasu.
Want to run that Linux game without installing the pesky OS? Here's an idea: Buy the Windows version! The Windows version will be out at least a year before the Linux port. The Windows version will be more supported by the manufacturer. The Windows version will not require you to recompile an X server to get better 3D graphics performance -- it will use proven, fast graphics drivers.
Buy the Windows version? Thats something I used to do. Now I view it as a last resort because I know that 12 months down the line, that Windows game stands a good chance of being dead in the water due to 'updates' to libraries made by more recent games installing themselves over the top of ones critical to that 1 year old game and breaking it. DLL Hell claims another casualty.
Now I look at games coming out and I make considerable enquiries to find out whether a Linux version is released, due for release, underway but not ready yet, under negotiation or even merely planned. Any of these is sufficient for me to put my wallet back in my pocket and WAIT. When I buy games, I want more than 12 months of use out of it. I still play games from a long way back in my collection and that matters to me. Just having the newest shiniest games is just icing on the cake - sweet but unfulfilling without the rest.
Why compromise? If you're going to pay money for those games of yours, at least have the good graces to play them on the fastest, most well-supported gaming platform there is for PC gaming.
And this well-supported gaming platform (Windows) benefits me how? I get the equivalent of a time-bombed game and I get to pay money for it? At least on Linux I can look at the libraries needed by a game and know that I can hope to untangle the resources it needs to keep functioning. And as time goes by, the arrival of Linux as a gaming platform is becoming less of a pipedream and more of a reality. My TNT2 card flies along quite nicely with XFree86 4.0.1 and the NVIDIA drivers - Descent 3, Quake 3 and others give me high performance fragging opportunities and I can grab Sim City 3000 or SMAC for some more cerebral entertainment. If we take the attitude that Windows is the be-all-and-end-all of gaming, we can never hope that a strong alternative will exist some day. For me, I like choice.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
By introducing a bootable Linux-cd, (And hey.. maybe even including an integrated VMware to run it under wintel) the developer can choose linux and its cheaper freeer dev tools.
The added beauty of all of this, is that the developer (hopefully) puts some real work into the Open-gl(etc) linux engines and hopefully liberates them into free-software world.
Furthermore, to make it all work, the linux distr would probably want to read the windows registry to hunt down clues on the correct drivers, net configs (for net gaming) and all the rest.
Liberate *that* and you've just introduced the solution for more general linux barrier crossing. Dumb asses don't *need* to know monitor refresh rates and Net card chipsets anymore. Wintel figured it out for them and Linux 'borrowed' the results. Great for 'real' work too!
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
When you make the CD it builds it for your system. They are not going to sell them as Linux bootable, despite the fact that'd it be a good idea, you have to build em yourself.
Even then support for basic hardware (generic monitors, keyboards, mice, sound cards) might not take up much space.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
This is the only reason I used a Windows box instead of a Linux box at work; Half Life was far too important to my productivity. Most of my apps I ran under emulated X, and even had bash and fav Unix tools installed on my Windows box (thankyou cygwin).
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Is linux available on a CD that will run without installing unto the hard drive (except perhaps for a swap file in c:\tmp) using a ramdisk and floppy for (slow) permanent storage ?
This would mean I can run linux on any PC I come across without having to install it on the hard drive.
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
And I will instantly be able to turn my ThinkNIC into a C64, with 500 MB of games - all on one CDROM.
The same thing can be done with lots of other old gaming platforms too, turning the ThinkNIC into a gaming console that can play _any_ game.
I am going to aim at the ThinkNIC because it is a standard platform with know hardware across the board, so it should be easy to load the correct drivers for any ThinkNIC.
Cool!
-- Never make a general statement.
Seriously folks - I really don't want to have to reboot my PC everytime I play a game. We already have something like that, and it is called a "console". Check it out. It works much better than a PC-uber-boot-disk, because nobody could possibly get a boot disk to work for every single piece of hardware out there.
:P
Furthermore, if I was a game developer, would I want to issue a new CD of my game everytime there is a new sound card on the market? (The answer is "no") Crazy kids these days.
I only see comments here for games, particularly regarding (1) Windows versions being earlier, and (2) non-standard hardware. Come back to reality - that is, where the *money* is. With this one can demonstrate the benefits of Linux *business* apps and tools with the standard PC hardware without having to scare the boss by having a "completely incompatible" machine. For open insecure uses, like coffeehouse browsers, one can have RAM-only thin clients that are *guaranteed* to lose the last user's email, credit card numbers, etc. on reboot. The linux install process itself should be better because you can have a full system active instead of just an install shell. Games are often the inspiration to drive the technology forward, and are a much better excuse than war. Neither, however, is the ultimate purpose.
On the contrary, this is an awesome idea.. Imagine buying a game that didn't depend on a specific OS or even platform!
I'm not a Linux Developer, but these problems seem kinda moot. All you have to do is create a tiny game partition that contains all specific drivers that a game could possibly use... Configuring would be a cinch, as long as it's open sourced properly and internet capable, updating with the latest drivers should be as easy as running WindowsUpdate (which is incredibly handy)...
It would also contain all the networking information that would be necessary for online/LAN play. You pop in the CD, it reads information off the partition, loads the drivers and boom, I have a enhanced game system running independent of the OS i'm using... when I am done and want to save a game, all I have to do is write to that partition.
When I'm in the middle of a Q3 game, the last thing on my mind is email.
Many systems now support a sleep mode. Get all the hardware and software people together... Create a system state saver for your OS. When you double click on the game, your system state would be saved, and your system would be quickly rebooted into your new game mode. When you exit, your system state is restored back to the way you left it.
Now this is at the least naive and at the most visionary. The actual implementation would be horribly long and complicated, and it would definitely be a pain to get this working right, but as long as it's all standardized (find a way to discourage competing "standards" a la M$), I think this idea would work, and would allow for easy porting from console systems to PC, and allow the PC game industry to work the way it does with the console systems...
Why on earth would anyone choose to play games on a PC? Use a console. The game works first time everytime, takes seconds to boot up, looks and sounds better than most "normal" PCs, costs less to buy (except PS2 games), is typically more fun and is more likely to be interesting to non-PC owners (you know, friends).
:-)
I'm the owner of a Dell Inspiron 7500 600Mhz laptop and a PlayStation. The only game that the poor miserable 600Mhz PIII can drive successfully is SimCity 3k. Any other game is stodgy as anything. My [several] years-old PS beats the 1-yr old PC completely for games.
On the other hand, the PC wipes the floor with the PS when it comes to compiling C++ or editing Perl scripts. And a fully loaded PC with today's flavour of "the best video card there will ever be" might look better than the PS game. The fact that the video card alone would cost more than the console is probably neither here nor there
As a general point, use the right tool for the job - a PC is incredibly versatile, but it's not the right iron to run games on.
Rob.
NetBSD boots on a DC, why not port Linux to the DC and make these "bootable" games work under Linux running on a DC? Linux games on a console platform, eliminates need to support different configurations of pc's.
UT works pretty well under linux. See http://lokigames.com for a free (beer) binary and look at the FAQs on openUT
All this talk about streamlining an OS and booting off a CD-ROM..When the better solution is to buy a cheap console system that does all this streamlining for you. The OS is right on an Integrated Circuit.
I agree a high power gaming machine is better to use but that costs big cash and that's something I don't have too much of. If I wanted my PC to be a console gaming system all I would have connected to it would be a controller and a monitor.This won't work because without a keyboard i couldn't get out of my bios.
Using a PC as a Game Console is like using a Vacuum as a Hairdresser, Just because it can do it doesn't mean it does a better job.
Now, imagine you were writing a game with SDL. You compile up the common versions, so it can be run directly from any of the OS'es you support. If newer hardware and/or drivers have come out, then it'll just use the drivers people already have, as it's running as a regular app under their OS of choice.
But, quite often I find myself booting my machine just to have a quick round of Counter-Strike. If the dist. CD booted straight into an OS and ran the game, that would be sweet. No more faffing around, logging in, doing a clean shutdown, being tempted to check my mail, read slashdot, etc... Just shove the CD in the drive and power-on.
Yes, drivers may be updated in the mean-time, but there's no reason why a bootable CD can't scan for partitions on a hard-disk, mount FAT or ext2 ones, and check for a /bootableDrivers directory and using those drivers to replace what's already on the CD, say. And if enough people were using a common method of creating the CDs, you'd only need this once. These files could be put there by whatever OS you want to use. If you never want to boot from CD, but don't need to worry about the fact that it's a bootable CD.
Nobody looses, so I don't see how it can be considered a bad idea.
If software manufactures catch on to this idea, they'll spend less time on the phone with users who can't get the software to run on their OS, and more importantly, new games will be written as linux native programs, meaning that linux users can install them natively on linux boxes, and Windows users can just boot off the CD to play. Voila! No need for a Windows port to a game! (No need for Windows at all! :) Of course, it'll take some time to get the CD's OS to autodetect a variety of devices and set itself up on the fly, but besides that, it sounds like a great idea!
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
Doesn't this increase the memory requirements for a game quite a bit? Then again RAM is cheap. With everything on RAM and reading off the cd this means those of us without a lot of space to spare on our drives can play games too. Also the general concept holds promise for making cheap gaming systems from x86/powerpc parts. For a somewhat related project see knoppix (presented at ALS): http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/
-ghostis
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
I have been reading the step-by-step guide and am wondering why X is necessary? Surely just using the vesa framebuffer would allow compatability with far more user configurations.
came out first for mac, and not many people are going to go buy a new computer, but when it hit linux a week (?) later, a lot of people fouind themselves installing linux and fighting with glide...
prominent game sites, gamespot.com comes to mind, actually had articles up within days on how to install linux just to play quakeiii
when Push Comes to Shove
WHAT cool LINUX games? Since when did LINUX get cool games before Windows?
And another thing (I admit I didn't read the article yet), but file access from a CD is going to be dog slow. That doesn't sound like fun too me.
The benefit is that it hasn't been done in years? Puhleeaze. Maybe the next objective in the internary is to make bootable DOS games that runs in extended mode.
and b)was enabled because of linux.
Linux is not the be all end all of everything. Just because the kernel and most of what makes a Linux distro is open sourced and free doesn't mean you should get pumped up over such a stupid idea.
Think of it as... you are a game developer.. you want a completely open API for games.. you write your game for linux..
No, if I'm a game developer, I want the most extensive feature set of APIs that matches the most current and cutting edge video cards, in order to maximize the graphics detail and performance of my game. Kindly point to me to the free and open-sourced 3d API available on linux that's not available on windows, and actually performs magnitudes better to justify the need to FORCE the user to reboot the machine just to play the game?
Shame on you to let your zealotry cloud your mind enough to sell such a ridiculous idea.
I think it was Rampart, if I recall correctly. Kind of frightening to see that and realize they're running NT on the box.
It took a lot of bitching to the Putt-Putt manager (man, those guys are tight-wads), but I finally got my 25 cents back.
In post-9/11 America, the CIA interrogates YOU!
Let's say I buy one of these games on a bootable CD. The CD includes drivers for A,B,C graphics cards. Now a couple of years down the line I install D graphics card. It comes with a Linux driver on CD-ROM which I install (Linux, of course, being supported by all vendors by then :). Now I feel like playing my game - so I put in the CD drive and reset. I wait, I wait some more. Up comes the message, "No supported graphics card found". The whole point of having drivers is modular upgradability. If we burn the drivers to a CD-ROM, how can they be upgraded?
all the cool linux games would fit on a floppy anyway.
And I dont' go around preaaching linux.
And I'm in no way saying 'this is the future of game development!'.
Okay. Let's look at this again.
When I said that a benefit is that this hasn't been done in years, it means, if someone *wants* to do this, now they have a nice, open way to do so. Is that not a benefit?
When I said it was enabled because of linux.. well, WASN'T IT? Sheesh. Note that I did not say 'It was enabled because of linux, therefore it is the coolest thing on earth, praise Linus'.. I simply stated a fact.
Note that I never said 'linux is better than windows for games' or anything like that.
For fuck sakes, all I said was it was *neat* that someone did this, so why is everyone so fucking bitchy about it?
Sell an idea? The only 'idea' I'm selling is that people are being overcritical of something that was simply 'neat'. Nobody said it was a revolution, but obviously you feel offended by that.
Oh I whole-heartedly agree; I was just trying to underscore the fact that ALL of the games I most enjoy playing currently are only available on Windows (MW3, SimCity3k, EQ). I am aware they have linux-based analogues but its just not the same. of course, even with including the os of choice on a CD doesn't solve the problem of diverse hardware. One of the best Unix-like OS's I've seen in this aspect is QNX's Neutrino. It supports a wide variety of hardware, and its Real-time. Possibilities...
Ok.
When I said that a benefit is that this hasn't been done in years, it means, if someone *wants* to do this, now they have a nice, open way to do so. Is that not a benefit?
Fallacy in your logic. You ASSUME as a premise that people want to go back to the 5 1/2 inch floppy "bootable games" era is a "good thing", so you conclude that having an open way it's a benefit.
Can you name any much much richer benefits bootable games will provide, considering all the disadvantages and inconvenience it will bring?
If not, your statement simply wasn't right.
When I said it was enabled because of linux.. well, WASN'T IT?
I'm sorry, I think you're skimming the point again. How is that a benefit? Because it was enabled by linux that it's a benefit? You say the fact it was linux it's a benefit, but you can't even describe how or WHY it's a benefit (which is independent of why you think bootable games are a benefit).
For fuck sakes, all I said was it was *neat* that someone did this, so why is everyone so fucking bitchy about it?
Uh, no you didn't. Let me quote you on what you really said:
I'm amazed at how many people are slamming this like it's a crappy idea. Shame on you!
It seems you're just condescendingly amazed at how you think you're better than the rest of us because we happen to think it's "a crappy idea." Shame on us indeed!
The only 'idea' I'm selling is that people are being overcritical of something that was simply 'neat'.
And how is it 'neat'? There's barely any practical use for it (it goes back to the "benefits" question you can't answer above)
Here's what you do to handle drivers.
You only need to install one thing, the interent connection. Then after the net connection is up, a small program is run and just grabs whatever drivers for whatever hardware you have.
But that sucks you say? I'm on a modem and that would take forever. You could save the modules to a harddisk(doesn't matter what file system it is), then the game can just load the drivers from there. I vision a standard site for all games that use the system to look for new drivers, and a third-party to maintain them. Then anyone that uses this wouldn't have to worry about driver support at all. It's already done.
The best part about that is, it you can have an auto-update utility. An apt-get like program that could just see what new drivers are avalible. Just have a message before you start a game that new drivers are avaliabe.
Something that could really take off if done correctly.
What about a secure file or http server? With all the binaries and /etc/ configs on cdrom, you don't have to worry about rootkits or tripwire or such.
I would like one with a bunch of security tools--all you'd have to do is install driver modules for all the network cards and you could plop the cd in any pc and have a network adminstration workstation... You wouldn't need X for that.
(nil)
The chip runs an x86 platform, which one I don't know.
It only takes a minute to boot. I have left mine running for a couple of months now, so you don't have to reboot if you don't want to reboot.
The machine has no fan, and the CDROM is very quiet. It only makes a little noise and only when it is loading a program.
They recomend using an internet mail host like hotmail.com or mynetscape.com.
The screen only supports 800x600, and I am spoiled by a 1280x1024 resolution on my main computer, but it is usable and the fonts look good.
The CDROM which the system boots from has over 400MB free, so it should be trivial to copy the CDROM to a directory, add in a bunch of programs and then make a new CDROM image with an autoboot image. Should even be able to modify the init files to run the emulator that I want upon booting, or maybe even give a choice of what to do when booting... If I hold down the C key it will boot into C64 mode.
The dream system, of course, would be to boot from the 4MB Flash card, mount a network file system and then use the CD drive as a CD/MP3/DIVIX player and gaming console.
-- Never make a general statement.
It appears to me that most of the people who have commented on this do not understand the real significance of the article.
As someone who has been scouring the Internet for several days looking for detailed, informative and useful information about how to create a bootable Linux CD, I find this article to be a godsend. In particular, it indicates why the boot image must be in diskette format, and how to fit what's needed into 1440K.
And finally, gaming is just one application. Others are limited only by the imagination.
Thank you Yamamori Takenori!
... is not as bad as it sounds - to a windows user (they're used to it). Even at work I reboot this NT 4 workstation often to prevent bluescreenitis. (If I had UPS for my linbox at home I'd never reboot). Your average win user turns the 'puter on, does some stuff and shuts down.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
How about bootable DVDs? It gives you much more room to play with....
/dev/fd0?
The only problems I see with this are
a) CDROMs are SLOW
b) You cant save out, unless the game manufacturers provide you with a parallel port dongle with some flash in it... or perhaps it could use
It would be the ultimate thing for game developers to have a rock-solid API which is totally 'platform independent'. Imagine a DVD with Intel, PowerPC etc binaries on it, but they share graphics/sound etc. Just put the DVD into practically any machine and play away!
If they can get around the speed problems, this would be the ultimate console killer... You could even produce an intel based console for these disks, thus increasing user-base again..
It's ideas like this that sound fantastic, but get crushed by politics...
Simon
Simon
The real linux_penguin has Slashdot ID 101961. Anyone else is an impostor. Including Bruce Perens.
Guys, you can't make a bootable windows game cd simply because if the CD contains some components of windows (such as the abstraction layer, api and media runtimes, etc) then you'd have to BUY a license for that OS since it is essentially bundled with the cd.
So, shipping games with Windows already included is a bad idea... MS will make EVEN more money, and games would cost more.
And sadly enough, a linux boot game cd is pointless. Most gamers out there run windows, they'd like to put in a cd and autoplay the game. They don't want to reboot. And honestly, the gaming companies don't see linux as a major market, so why make bootable linux cds when you can just make games that work on Windows?
I may be way off base and wrong, but what nobody seems to be thinking of here is the RAM issue. First of all, by booting the operating system off of the CD you pretty much _have_ to load it into a RAMDISK, which takes a sizeable chunk of RAM up. Unless you do some UMSDOS stuff, or have a free partition or a linux partition, I don't really see any alternative for that. That's a bad thing right there. Problem two involving ram is the swap file/virtual memory (depending on what OS you like...) Where is that going to go? Unless you have 512 mb RAM in your system, you are going to have issues with running out of memory for almost every game you play. What are they going to do, stick that on a UMSDOS thing, too? Last I checked, UMSDOS doesn't even work that well, and what do you do if the user is trying to play without a hard drive, or they run NTFS (yes, I know they are working on support...) or some other unsupported filesystem. No swap file! This pretty much limits you to booting off of a CD to play XBill or something. As much as XBill rules, I don't think it's worth that much of a hassle. Somebody explain to me where I'm wrong if I am, please.
//FIXME: Bad
it's in my head
Putting a little more work in this idea, and there is no excuse for game developers not to use linux.
Now if they can deliver the game, with the option to boot from the cd (attention i said option).
They can't say that it is difficult to make games for linux because, there is inconsistency between, the distribution, and the kernels and the...
If you cant make it work on your normal linux system, you can always boot directly from the cd.
Now why haven't this been done before, maybe because, the available OS's where closed, and had the burden of license payments.
In the long run it will be easier to develop self booting games, rather than having the games being compatible with win 9x, win nt, win... a.s.o. A linux cd game boot system would be much more consistent. And you can make chances to the OS, on your cd without having to care about breaking compatibility, because it is only running your game.
--
Dont mess with my e-mail adress
This is why you burn your own CD instead of buying one, Anonymous Coward. You can include the drivers you need and if down the line you get another peice of hardware you can burn another (or re-burn for a CD-RW) instead of buying one.
I can remeber when most games booted themselves (though rarer for IBM-PC games) and this system with the CD-R or CD-RW is much better than those ever where for dealing with different and new hardware.
Some examples:
Hybrid CDs
Warcraft II (Blizzard), although not all, in the US a hybrid CD was released both for Mac and PC
Star Trek: Borg Default releases everywhere were hybrid
Myst: Collectors edition Default releases where also running on PowerPC's
Bootable from CD
Terminal Velocity Although the main released did need DOS to boot up, there was a bootable version as well. Although most computers back then didnt support bootable CDroms.
Myst (Mac) A friend of mine had Myst with his Mac back a few years ago, that CD was bootable as well.
So far I know there are more Mac bootables out there than PC bootables. Mostly because Apple has more standardised hardware. The big problem with the PC is that you have to include a megalibrary of drivers.