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OS Independent Games?

Posted by Cliff on 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?

3 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. what about patches? by AresTheImpaler · · Score: 4, Interesting

    yeah.. but how are you going to apply patches?

  2. Um. Please. by PylonHead · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!

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  3. Re:Off the top of my head... by rusty0101 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

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    You never know...