Just a passing thought. Lets say I make a video game and I aimed it at a specific hardware setup. Would it be possible to play the game without an OS in the background, like all the good ol' arcade machines. Just switch it on and it loads the game. Is that possible?

Yes.

yes....but have fun lol.
you would have to build your own base OS of sorts. handling loading up the game when the PC boots, handling memory allocations, ect....

i made my own operating system once before.

it was like DOS only much much worse. just plain old command line stuff and i supported like 5 commands lol...but it was a learning experience.

Yes, that makes sense. Or maybe if the program was compiled for DOS and run on a machine that booted to dos and had a line like... load game in the autoexec.bat file. Would that be a better solution? easier? Or more problematic?

I know I said No OS but still.. that would appear pretty much straight after the motherboard info screen stuff.

that could work too. although i am wondering if you would have to build some kind of driver system into your game to handle different video cards. but if you target a specific hardware then you can just program specifically for that and not worry about it.

any specific reason you are wanting to do this?

couldnt you just make it a program that runs when windows is started ? you could easily replace the windows loading screen with a loading screen (bitmap) of your own to mask the windows starting up. and there are ways to cut out alot of the stuff windows loads up and keep it from going to its normal gui interface and instead go to your game.exe

of course this would take longer to load then the DOS based one or the "your own OS" methods, but would be the easiest to implement imo.

any tutorials for building an os????

sounds like so much fun!

Quote: Original post by rpstaekwondo
any tutorials for building an os????

sounds like so much fun!

I can probably refer you to my site and osdev.org.

Quote: Original post by Mr T 87
Yes, that makes sense. Or maybe if the program was compiled for DOS and run on a machine that booted to dos and had a line like... load game in the autoexec.bat file. Would that be a better solution? easier? Or more problematic?

Have fun writing a bank-switched video memory mode 32-bit graphics subsystem! You know, while the rest of us enjoy linear addressing. [smile]

(You could use Linux and one of those framebuffer extensions instead, might make things a bit easier.)

I think it would be feasible but it would probably take ~2 times longer because not only do you have to develop a stable game, but you also have to develop a stable "kernel" of sorts. Not to mention writing a VGA graphics driver, sound driver, keyboard driver, hard-drive driver...

Quote:
any specific reason you are wanting to do this?

It's for a gift for a friend. If I can get the kernel bit sorted then the rest should be easy, I'm gonna build up an arcade style machine around it, the game is already done, i'm just modding it.

Thanks for all the replies, i'm gonna be setting up a few environments in virtual pc to help me decide what would be best.