4 ms·
All that's left now is SDL for UEFI, and then all our games can run in a pre-OS environment.
by ronsor 6mo ago
All that's left now is SDL for UEFI, and then all our games can run in a pre-OS environment.
- chaps 6mo agoThat honestly sounds amazing. Imagine booting into something like a grub menu that's just a list of classic games.
- queuebert 6mo agoI would guess a modern BIOS chip is as powerful as an NES, right?
- fluoridation 6mo agoWhat do you mean by "BIOS chip"? Like, the flash memory that stores the motherboard's firmware? I don't think that contains any processing elements.
- sedatk 6mo agoBIOS can only manage VESA which is much much slower than the capabilities of a modern GPU, so they might have meant graphical performance in regards to that.
- jasomill 6mo agoVESA BIOS Extensions support direct framebuffer access in protected mode, and I don't imagine the lack of accelerated 2D operations would be a practical bottleneck when implementing NES-style graphics on modern PCs. UEFI GOP additionally supports accelerated bitblt, but again YAGNI for 2D game performance at reasonable framerates on a modern PC.
- snazz 6mo agoYou can do substantially more in UEFI than NES-level games. (See https://uefi.org/specs/UEFI/2.9_A/12_Protocols_Console_Support.html#graphics-output-protocol https://uefi.org/specs/UEFI/2.9_A/12_Protocols_Console_Suppo...)
- Xirdus 6mo agoI basically had this setup back in the day. I don't really know how I ended up with it, I was 7 at the time and none of it was intentional - but my bootloader had two entries: I could boot into Windows 98, or I could boot into Worms.
- Dwedit 6mo agoIt's a similar idea, but that's a DOS menu. At the point when the menu appears, MS-DOS 7.1 has already been loaded.
- tetrisgm 6mo agoStupid question but... would bundling the binary with an ASM port of something that could run this technically make it possible to run without the OS? I realize this is basically doing docker for DOS games and incredibly stupid, I'm just curious about the thought experiment
- dale_glass 6mo agoProbably your parents setting it up? As far as I know, Worms is a normal DOS game, so the only way for that to happen should be a DOS install configured to just auto-start Worms on boot. Which makes sense as a way to keep a kid away from anything that could cause trouble. I very vaguely recall that there used to be a very few PC games that worked as boot floppies and possibly didn't use DOS at all, but it was a rarity and Worms definitely wasn't one.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- BirAdam 6mo agoWell… UEFI is kind of modern DOS.
- ahartmetz 6mo agoMore like modern BIOS++ IMO
- BirAdam 6mo agoExcept that UEFI supports loading PE executables which replace it and have direct access to hardware… so… not really BIOS-like. Some UEFI implementations provide BIOS compatibility, but that’s via an UEFI application whether provided by the implementer or via something like CSMWrap: https://github.com/CSMWrap/CSMWrap https://github.com/CSMWrap/CSMWrap
- lnx01 6mo agoIt certainly is not.
- rwmj 6mo agoThere are a lot of parallels: It has a janky set of buggy drivers. It has backslashes in paths. It has a shell that is "inspired" by COMMAND.COM. And it's basically a program loader where every program immediately replaces it and drives the hardware directly.
- mananaysiempre 6mo agoThat... Shouldn’t be terribly difficult? Though I don’t believe UEFI has sound drivers (you’ll have problems writing one yourself because even frickin’ sound-codec chips have NDA-only datasheets these days), and the stupidest thing is that the “graphics output protocol” doesn’t indicate vsync so you can’t do tear-free blitting, which is literally worse than VGA.
- DiabloD3 6mo agoMost support Intel HDA. The problem is that people don't use onboard audio anymore (because its incredibly and audibly noisy). They use USB or Bluetooth. Bluetooth absolutely isn't standardized and is a mess, and USB miiiiiiight be okay if you limit to a subset of EHCI and USB Audio Class 1.0 devices. At this point, its easier to just use Linux and run your game as pid 1.
- ronsor 6mo agoYou can strip down Linux significantly as well: no multi-user, no extra syscalls, no FS support beyond initramfs/tmpfs, etc.
- anthk 6mo agoBluetooth sucks against the raw codec of a soundcard. If you want lossy music, that's it. But given autotune trends and how genz-ers grew up with shitty early smartphone loudspeakers and not much better BT ones they aren't used to proper music and their tastes are rot forever.
- DiabloD3 6mo agoI refuse to use Bluetooth, too. But, unfortunately, people keep buying that trash. We're kinda forced to support their mistakes.
- ahartmetz 6mo agoRegarding onboard audio: About 10 years ago, it became "common knowledge" about mainboards that onboard sound has become good enough for almost anybody. It has never been true for me, maybe because my recent mainboards have been lower middle class (AMD B350 / B650) largely chosen for good CPU power converters. Because my two (PC) laptops since 2020 have both had really damn good headphone outputs, I can believe that some good / expensive mainboards have it, too. It's not exotic technology anymore. Meanwhile, my desktop PC has a 20+ years old M-Audio prosumer card that also sounds great. (Now rigged with a PCIe -> PCI converter card off AliExpress)
- pjmlp 6mo agoWelcome to Amiga games, in many cases the floppy would contain the boot loader that would directly jump into the game. At least on the Amiga 500 you would not go through the trouble to start Workbench, only to load the game, unless you were a lucky owner of an external hard drive.
- markus_zhang 6mo agoI recall many IBM-PC games are bootable games. I inserted a floppy , resets the computer, and then it directly boots into the game. The disk must contain a boot sector and drivers and such.
- pjmlp 6mo agoAs well, although I think in the Amiga this was more common, to buy games that were already prepared like this. At least on my circle for doing the same with PC games, we built the floppies ourselves, then again, it could be a side effect that you could hardly buy any legal games in Portugal during those days, even regular shops would sell pirated games as originals.
- deaddodo 6mo agoPC had bare metal games too. They were called “booters” and you can find an entire category of them on mobygames: https://www.mobygames.com/platform/pc-booter/ https://www.mobygames.com/platform/pc-booter/
- pjmlp 6mo agoYeah, but I never saw them, missed my reply on the other thread?
- deaddodo 6mo agoWhether I saw your other response or not is moot. Your comment said "welcome to Amiga games", as if it were unique to Amiga. The context of the thread is PC, where they had their own booter/bare-metal games. So you don't have to go to "Amiga games world", you're already in the proper world.
- floxy 6mo agoWhat's the latest with Intel's Management Engine / Minix that runs on every Intel chipset? Is that still a thing? Did they harden it? Or can you still get access? https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-operating-system/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op...
- gblargg 6mo agoSDL for bare metal.