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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.)"
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....
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.
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?
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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.
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
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?).
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.
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?
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?
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
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...
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.
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.
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
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
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.
UT works pretty well under linux. See http://lokigames.com for a free (beer) binary and look at the FAQs on openUT
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.
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.
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.
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.
Look buddy. I mean that the fact that someone took the time to DO something, and present it as another OPTION that previously didn't exist, even if it's not all that useful, is still GOOD. I'm not implying that we should go back to bootable gaming.
You stated that I'm being a zealot because I think it's neat that, because the guy had linux available, he brought an idea to realization, namely, bootable gaming discs *regardless* of how 'good' or 'bad' the idea is. Linux enabled him to do this. I'm not implying any sort of
a) direct benefit to the gaming community b) godlike status of linux or c) saying it couldn't have been done without.
Yeah. I DID say I'm amazed at how people are slamming it. Rather than constructively look at what good merits there may be, everyone just says' what a fucking stupid idea'. Pessimists.
How's it neat? *I* think it's neat. Barely any practical use for it? Who said there has to be? And who is trying to answer 'benefits' questions? I'm simply commenting that everyone slamming on this because they can't see any use for it is rediculous.....
NO kidding.
I meant, it didn't exist *in the modern PC world*. I don't meant that this guy/people *invented* the idea.. I don't even mean to say it's a wonderful idea.. just kind of 'neat' that someone is thinking of it again.