Rebooting to play games on a PC is stupid.

Join the long line of those who have had the same idea... and been rudely hit in the face by reality.

(I would provide a longer, more detailed and gentler explanation, but you can find them by Googling. There are at least two or three threads on the topic on this very site alone.)

Quote:Original post by Oluseyi
Rebooting to play games on a PC is stupid.

If I want to play a game on any of my consoles I don't have to reboot my pc...
You don't install something like this on your main work pc. It's more something for in the living room.

Many others have had similar idea's. Where they went wrong is that they tried to make their own distribution while there are already many out there.

I suggest you google a bit for 'games linux livecd' and team up with one of the existing projects. Sure, they may not have the good looking and easy to use gui you've dreamed of but that's where you come in ;)

Just remembered that MythTV has a Mame module and a good looking gui. That may be a good starting point.

[edit]
Did a check on MythTV and it has a frontend for many different emulators and for generic pc games:
http://www.mythtv.org/modules.php?name=MythFeatures

All you need now is a LiveCD like KnoppMyth and your done.
http://mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html

There was a discussion about this on slashdot. Haven't looked at the comments (slashdot comments tend to be somewhat annoying to me), but they might give you some ideas.

Personally I think there are far too many distros as it is, but feel free to try.

The biggest problem is going to be the video card drivers. The open source nvidia drivers give less than stellar performance, and if you try to integrate the official drivers you'll get a lot of people that won't help out because it "taints" the kernel.

Recently I was inspired by a thread here about making a live game CD, basically the idea I had was to modify a gnoppix live CD in such a way that the game could be either:

a) Installed on a full blown Linux distro
b) Installed on a Windows System (provided the game is crossplatform)
c) Run directly from the CD.

Since I amno where near looking for distribution channels for my game, the idea is there to be explored but the clossest I got so far as to implement such a thing was downloading the gnoppix iso.

Now, since zlib 1.1.5 or so, I have been unable to run my Linux copy of Heavy Metal: FAKK2, I guess it may be a good experiment to try and convert it that way.

[Edited by - Kwizatz on August 16, 2005 5:31:13 PM]

I believe there are already a few game live CDs. As for a game development oriented distribution, that's one I haven't seen yet.

I use Ubuntu because installing graphics drivers is a quick apt-get, but a distro that already comes with all of the related libraries and tools, and perhaps a wad of documentation pre-installed, might be very useful to get beginners started on the road to game development.

I have a live CD distro of America's Army. Doesn't work on my PC, but it was a nice try. The standard Windows version works, by the way. This might give you some insight on the difficulties of providing drivers for every possible system.

Quote:Original post by Name_Unknown
Reboot to what?

To your game distro. It would probably have sufficient structural differences to current Linux distros to make it an impractical workstation or production environment, so the user would need to have two Linux distributions locally installed (or, alternatively, each game for this distro could bundle the distro on CD and bootstrap to that first, then automatically distro itself ).

Quote:Which Reality?

The reality that a gaming-specific operating system is a bit of an oxymoron on a general-purpose device (PC). Those who counter that console run gaming-specific operating systems (if any) are clearly glossing over the fact that consoles are not, by default, general-purpose devices. That the Xbox is a "rebadged PC" is immaterial; that it is popularly perceived as a device intended solely for playing video games (and other forms of non-work entertainment with the next generation) is critical.

Quote:Your response is elitist, blunt, and a purposeful tactic to kill the discussion before anything can even begin to be communicated.

Nonsense. For starters, discussion continued anyway. Secondly, being blunt is not a malicious action. Thirdly, I explicitly anticipated others pointing to similar projects (ie, your idea isn't new), fostering further discussion.

Quote:If you don't like the idea, that is fine, but please don't use your privledges to destroy a thread before anything constructive can be communicated.

Yeah, the "privilege" argument. You're essentially saying that, since I'm staff, I am no longer entitled to express dissenting, controversial or ardent positions. Sorry, but I never gave up my rights as member when accepting the responsibility of nurturing this site's growth. You're hardly the first to think or express this, nor will you be the last, and the response will be the same every time: uh, no.

Quote:That is elitism and direct discrimination.

And finally, the martyr element. Are you intimating that I can't be strictly critical and dismissive of your suggestion, even if I've seen numerous identical previous attempts all fail? How does the proliferation of Linux distributions, with all their minor incompatibilities, help gaming at all? Why not advocate a Linux Gaming Spec based on LSB? Is the problem even as acute as you seem to think? What about the alternate tactic of employing development technologies that abstract major and minor platform differences and more easily allow for broad deployment, such as Python + PyGame or Java? These technologies can easily leverage available hardware acceleration, require no specific configuration and are available today.

At root, there's no reason for me to give your idea credence. There is no evidence of thought to the larger issues of how gaming fits into our general computer usage or lives as a whole, no indication of research on previous information or examination of alternatives. This may sound elitist and it may sound blunt, but sometimes it's just true: why should I coddle your ambitions? Why shouldn't I brusquely brush you aside as I move on to other things?

Above all, why couldn't you employ your own suggested tactic and have ignored my "non-contributory" post?