I’m looking up for communities or scenes whose purpose is making games that you play from bootup. Not necessarily boot sector games (stuff that has to fit in 512 bytes), but things that would behave much like cartridges in old consoles, where the hardware boots straight into the game.
Put another way, games that “are the OS”, either for x86 or ARM. My search engine-fu didn’t manage to find anything other than boot sector games and several Batocera guides.
Would a game that is essentially a micro Linux distro count? I feel that should be pretty doable as a bootable USB stick or CD.
If you did it that way you’d have to bundle the Linux kernel plus graphics drivers at a minimum. But I wonder how much of the OS you could avoid having. Certainly you wouldn’t need a Desktop Environment. I wonder if you would need something like X or Wayland or if you could get away without that (to run games built in a normal-ish userspace way). I guess finding the minimal environment for SDL would be a good starting point. That sounds like an interesting exercise for sure.
Although something like that probably isn’t as pure as you’re looking for, it would be pretty cool to do anyway. Maybe we should start a club.
Is the technical distinction of booting as an OS an important one, or are you just interested in games that boot up very quickly, such as in the cartridge days of the N64 and so on?
I’ll admit, I still think games could do a lot more on the latter. It’s still a tragedy to me that so much wait time is devoted to the company logos for things like Speedtree or Criware.
My interest is in sidestepping operating systems entirely, not just loading fast, so I’d say the distinction is important
