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Bootable Game CDROMs Using Linux

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the now-if-only-there-were-more-games dept.

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.)"

8 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Now if only I could do this for my windoze games by daved321 · · Score: 3

    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....

  2. Useful for demo disks by Izaak · · Score: 3
    This came across the SDL mailing list recently. There is actually a lot of cool things happening in Linux game development, but much of it is not yet visible to the average user yet. I may give this bootable CD thing a look and see if it will be useful for making gridslammer demos.

    Thad

    --

    The Bolachek Journals

  3. How does this help me? by generic-man · · Score: 5

    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.
  4. PC Consoles by Peter+Millerchip · · Score: 3

    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? :)

    1. Re:PC Consoles by kaphka · · Score: 3
      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.
      Let me get this straight. Gaming companies are going to force 100% of their customers to reboot their machines every time they want to run a game, effectively turning a protected multi-tasking system into a souped up PC-XT, just so they can support the 0.01% of their customers that do not own a copy of Windows?
      --

      MSK

  5. Not a good thing by quantum+bit · · Score: 4

    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

  6. Remember 15 years ago? by toast- · · Score: 3

    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?

  7. missing the point by BenHmm · · Score: 5

    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.