this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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lmao, what if single game distros, purely optimized to run a single game with only the dependencies needed to launch and run it.
Unreal Tournament 2003 actually came with a bootable DVD that would boot directly into Linux and run the game.
Fast forward 20 years and Epic actively hates Linux because Valve is improving it
Wait, what?
Yeah, I should have that lying around here somewhere. But if I recall correctly it actually did not work on my PC back then.
You can probably find an iso on archive.org.
I'm an Unreal fan since '99 and that's the first time I hear about it. I'm not afraid of not finding that dvd, but of not finding a sata drive to burn it and then spin it. I guess it's in The Box where all old power adaptors and proprietary cables got tossed in.
People have been crazy enough to try.
This is the only time I've ever been tempted to cheat
That was a thing for DOS systems. Hell, for the Apple II, NES, and a bunch of other systems it was the only way to launch a program
like on some sort of console?
Even consoles these days require you to install files onto the machine before it'll play...
modern consoles run a lot more than one game, not even just games.
Maybe with an
autoexec.batand aconfig.sysas plain-text files in the game distribution, so that you can still set up your network configuration, CD drive and sound card?wouldn't that make it only work on windows? or dos, even?
Indeed. Back in the day (by which I mean, up until about when Doom was released, around '93) then one of the "joys" of PC gaming was that you had fuck all memory and had to prepare a "boot disk" for every game, bypassing the operating system, basically to load as little as possible so that there was space for your game to run. Trying to fit the bare essential drivers - sound card, memory extender, CD ROM if you needed it for that game, mouse or joystick if you needed those - was a right fucking adventure every time, and it was always a toss-up whether you could get sound, music, or both, in any particular game.
If you're an old fart, or if you've ever used DosBox to play retro games, you might be familiar. DosBox makes it altogether too easy - loads of RAM and disk space, emulates anything, and it's very quick to swap things out.
A few things changed around that time:
I'm no Windows fan, but it was a hell of an improvement.
The concept of a "pure UEFI" gaming environment might sound great - direct access to hardware, what could be more efficient? - but the unfortunate reality is that direct access to hardware is a real pain in the arse. Every game would need a complete copy of everyone's graphics drivers, everyone's sound drivers, everyone's network stack, .,. . Computers are much more complicated than they used to be (although in some ways, simpler too) - very few games would work at all. You might get Terraria in 640x480 in 16 colours and no hardware-accelerated drawing, and maybe some sound effects if you'd a very common integrated sound chip on your motherboard.
The operating system is both a gateway and a gatekeeper to hardware; makes a lot of stuff appear to work the same, regardless of what it is really, and the ones that haven't been enshittified are really quite efficient, do their thing and get out of the way. Even the consoles have an OS for hardware access now, although they're lightweight. I think it would be a very backward step to be rid of them.