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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.)"
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.
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
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.