4 ms·
Packaging a game with the entire OS was very common in all consoles, since the game was supposed to be the only thing running, and in real time .
by muststopmyths 3y ago
Packaging a game with the entire OS was very common in all consoles, since the game was supposed to be the only thing running, and in real time .
- dijit 3y agosort of, if you go back into the NES and Gameboy days, sure, but PS2/Xbox had an operating system that it loaded and so did PS3/Xbox 360. Microsoft took a step "backwards" in allowing it to load any variant of the SDK that you built the game with. In contrast, you had to keep rebuilding your PS4 games when they came out with new major SDK versions, so the development experience was definitely better on the xbox one. (oh, and you could turn a test kit into a retail kit was great too, as someone who worked closer to live operations than dev only).
- mhh__ 3y agoThe Wii UI is partly a library (shared library even?) iirc
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoUnikernel, baby! (Everything old really is new again, and I love it)
- TMWNN 3y agoMany PC games through the mid-1980s were shipped as booters, for ease of use and for copy protection. The growing popularity of hard drives caused the shift to key disks, code wheels/books, and other forms of copy protection. Same for many Apple II games. Although C64 does not have disk autoboot, one can argue that the same principle exists there too, again because of copy protection; many Commodore disk games use custom disk formats that Commodore DOS cannot read. `LOAD "*",8,1` loads a boostrap that in turn reprograms the drive to load the format for the rest of the game.