Could Live-CD technology make computers the best gaming systems available?

[Adamant1988]

The question posed is this.. suppose that game developers chose to create a mini-linux distribution for the intent of doing nothing but loading up a video game on your desktop, and then used Live CD technology to make that run.

So, essentially, you would put the game disk in your computer, it would load up the game with the only processes that are necessary for running the game, and you would be on your way. I think that would be a sweet deal, what do you guys think?

EDIT: Sorry about the title, I meant 'computers'. LOL.

[mips]

In your title you refer to consoles but in the subject you refer to pcs ?

For PCs it would be a viable but slow option, then you have the issue of different spec hardware to contend with. Not so great for consoles as it is faster to load the OS from rom.

[Mateo]

it takes about 10 minutes to load the ubuntu livecd on my computer. i certainly would never want to play a game on a livecd

[mips]

it takes about 10 minutes to load the ubuntu livecd on my computer. i certainly would never want to play a game on a livecd


True but I suspect that the OS on the cd would be a very stripped down slimline Linux.

[Adamant1988]

In your title you refer to consoles but in the subject you refer to pcs ?

For PCs it would be a viable but slow option, then you have the issue of different spec hardware to contend with. Not so great for consoles as it is faster to load the OS from rom.

Try actually reading the original post? I apologized and made a correction :P

[PriceChild]

I've edited the title.

Isn't this essentially just what consoles do?

[Lucifiel]

That is an interesting concept but how would you save the game then? And more importantly, wouldn't the game be dependent on pre-installed drivers and certain configurations in order to run well? Unless the Livecd contains many variety of drivers, etc?

[Mateo]

I've edited the title.

Isn't this essentially just what consoles do?

no, consoles are not livecds. They have an OS built in.

[Henry Rayker]

Consoles have a basic OS on the machine. Support hardware is used in reading from the disks to RAM, in most cases. Using a live cd for gaming purposes wouldn't be terribly great, due to the many varying hardware situations. When you install the game on your hard drive, you are, essentially, compiling the game to run on your particular hardware; running from a live-cd would be incredibly slow for this reason.

[Mateo]

Consoles have a basic OS on the machine. Support hardware is used in reading from the disks to RAM, in most cases. Using a live cd for gaming purposes wouldn't be terribly great, due to the many varying hardware situations. When you install the game on your hard drive, you are, essentially, compiling the game to run on your particular hardware; running from a live-cd would be incredibly slow for this reason.

Yeah, it seems like this idea goes in the opposite direction. In the old days games would basically run completely off of their cartridge or CD. More and more the system itself is holding the data. Today I believe many consoles have parts of the game be installed.

This idea would go in the opposite direction and have everything on the CD. I agree that it would just be too slow for modern expectations.

[Bachstelze]

No. Anyone who has used a Live CD for more than five minutes knows how horribly slow it is. Especially for gaming, it's a no-go.

[mips]

Try actually reading the original post? I apologized and made a correction :P

I started writing my post before you submitted the edited version.

[Mateo]

I also think there would be hardware problems. Could the liveCD have both nvidia and ati drivers preinstalled, so that it automatically detects which to use and uses it?

[DJ Wings]

Here's my contribution to this discussion. (http://stl-dev.blogspot.com)
The SuperTux Live CD. A small CD image that can get SuperTux Mi1.9 running in minutes.

[prizrak]

Been tried and failed horribly. When AMD64 first came out, there was an initiative to make games that will boot a stripped down version of Linux to run nothing but the game. Since you never heard of the tech you can tell how well it worked ;)

[sysdrum]

In the days of dos and the 5.25 floppy i ran most games like ultima 3/4/5 with a boot floppy and the start disk as one... those where the days... Gateway such a great game so timeless... but anyway.. more to the point it would be a step back... on the XBoX 360/PS3 for load time reasons they do a cache dump to the HDD but for the xbox360 with NO hdd the load times is for ever longer because it is playing straight from disc.






A wall is a wall no matter how hard you run into it.

[Adamant1988]

Been tried and failed horribly. When AMD64 first came out, there was an initiative to make games that will boot a stripped down version of Linux to run nothing but the game. Since you never heard of the tech you can tell how well it worked ;)

Oh, I see, I had no idea this had been tried. Do you have a source for this information?

[DJ Wings]

What about the copy2ram code? If you've got a 200MB CD image, one could, in theory copy it all to RAM (assuming you have about 384MB for the whole uncompressed sys), and run it from there at full speed.

[qamelian]

Oh, I see, I had no idea this had been tried. Do you have a source for this information?

Actually, it's been tried several times and not always badly. My first experience with Gentoo was a live CD that booted into Gentoo and loaded straight into Unreal Tournament. It worked amazingly well on my desktop PC and inspired me to give Gentoo a try. Unfortunately, I chose to do a Stage 1 Gentoo install and 38 hours later had a system that wouldn't boot, which inspired me not to try Gentoo again for a while!;)

Although I don't recall the names off the top of my head, I know that I've read about a couple of Linux distros that tray to do just this with some existing games. It might not be an idea that is ready for prime-time just yet, but as hardware detection continues to improve, I really don't see why it couldn't work. I think one key component though would be a method of pre-caching game content in the background, such as pre-loading the data for the next level/zone of a game while the current level is being played, the goal being to avoid long loading times both to start the game and between levels.

[MetalMusicAddict]

Though this might not be the best idea its intriguing enough for me to try to do a disk for Tremulous. :)

[mips]

Actually, it's been tried several times and not always badly. My first experience with Gentoo was a live CD that booted into Gentoo and loaded straight into Unreal Tournament.

The Sabayon dvd usually has somehting similair but you have to select the game from the menu instead of installing the os. I suppose you could omit the menu and boot straight into the game.

[Mateo]

Though this might not be the best idea its intriguing enough for me to try to do a disk for Tremulous. :)

how?

[MetalMusicAddict]

how?

Well Reconstructor (http://reconstructor.aperantis.com/) can be a way but Ill probably have the guy that does the disks for Ubuntu Studio do it the "standard" way.

Start with a CLI system as a base. Add no DE but you would need X, Tremulous and a way to start Tremulous at boot.

Ill have to play with some things to see if it can be done.

[Lucifiel]

No. Anyone who has used a Live CD for more than five minutes knows how horribly slow it is. Especially for gaming, it's a no-go.

Errrr... you kidding? Wolvix was a very fast LiveCd. It loaded 3 times faster than Ubuntu livecd for me.

I'm quite sure that there are other LiveCds which are just as fast, if not faster!

[qamelian]

Errrr... you kidding? Wolvix was a very fast LiveCd. It loaded 3 times faster than Ubuntu livecd for me.

I'm quite sure that there are other LiveCds which are just as fast, if not faster!

I agree. Actually, even the Ubuntu Desktop CD doesn't seem that slow to me. It only take about 40 seconds longer to boot from the LiveCD than to boot from the HD, and it runs at a perfectly acceptable speed for me to use it for work on PCs that don't have Windows installed.

[Lucifiel]

I agree. Actually, even the Ubuntu Desktop CD doesn't seem that slow to me. It only take about 40 seconds longer to boot from the LiveCD than to boot from the HD, and it runs at a perfectly acceptable speed for me to use it for work on PCs that don't have Windows installed.

Well, it took me a few minutes to get the Ubuntu LiveCd fully loaded. I guess the process differs for everyone.

[Adamant1988]

I would think that a stripped down Ubuntu-kernel with only important device drivers, and X, loading would be needed, as well as a script that forces the game to start at Boot. Perhaps it would be slow, but I also like the suggestion of loading to ram, perhaps that could be done?

You've got to think that without all those resources being dedicated to keeping a bloated environment running, with tons of extra processes that aren't essential to the game, the game might actually run at full speed or faster than what you would see normally on a computer. Although, I would think that load times would be very slow.

[Lucifiel]

Or perhaps, if the user already has a linux-swap partition then the livecd could utilise that as well.

[juxtaposed]

Most people get annoyed at having to boot into windows to play games, now they would have to boot into this special version of linux nomatter what OS they are in.

[Adamant1988]

Most people get annoyed at having to boot into windows to play games, now they would have to boot into this special version of linux nomatter what OS they are in.

I would think the potential speed benefits might be worth it to them, not to mention platform independence. Imagine how many more copies of a game you could sell when you're not limiting yourself to Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux in general. Just pop in the CD and reboot. :D.

[DJ Wings]

SLAX ownz you all. The devel version uses Glibc 2.5 and comes out to 160MB, with kde-apps.lzm and kde-office.lzm removed. It's also easy to remaster and customize.

[Adamant1988]

SLAX ownz you all. The devel version uses Glibc 2.5 and comes out to 160MB, with kde-apps.lzm and kde-office.lzm removed. It's also easy to remaster and customize.

Perhaps slax would be best :P but as far as I know Ubuntu's kernel will support the widest range of hardware.

[Polygon]

the point with live cd's is that its supposted to boot up an operating system and run it without ever writing to the hard drive..... and swapping things in and out of memory and loading new stuff from the cd constantly is much much much slower then accessing it on a hard drive

unless a system is created wehre you create like a 5 gb partition on your hard drive that every one of these "game live cds" are able to write to, i doubt that this would be useful

and not to mention you would have to wait each time for the game to install its game files to the hard drive......

i think its just easier the way we have

[prizrak]

Oh, I see, I had no idea this had been tried. Do you have a source for this information?

It was years ago so not anymore. I think I read it on www.fcenter.ru (Russian). Here is a link to something that mentions America's Army bootable CD http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_9485_9488%5E9563%5E9598,00.html

[qamelian]

the point with live cd's is that its supposted to boot up an operating system and run it without ever writing to the hard drive..... and swapping things in and out of memory and loading new stuff from the cd constantly is much much much slower then accessing it on a hard drive

unless a system is created wehre you create like a 5 gb partition on your hard drive that every one of these "game live cds" are able to write to, i doubt that this would be useful

and not to mention you would have to wait each time for the game to install its game files to the hard drive......

i think its just easier the way we have
Not always. There are a few liveCDs that load entirely into RAM if you have enough and never touch the CD again until you reboot. The live CD distros often run at positively maniacal speed because they aren't being slowed down by any kind of physical disk access.

[DoctorMO]

If you want to save game states then perhaps a usb mass storage device?

[Adamant1988]

If you want to save game states then perhaps a usb mass storage device?

Perhaps Live-USB similar to Puppy?

[sysdrum]

The way it is now seems okay but I see how having none system limited gaming would be good? why not build the game to install on all oses but run like a layer? using the linux os on say the windows api's?
they are working on a system build for binaries that may achive that? so in a sorta way the CD Ideas could work.
but the usb idea hmm.. sorta like the memory cards on the ps 2 and the xbox?

[mips]

so in a sorta way the CD Ideas could work.
but the usb idea hmm.. sorta like the memory cards on the ps 2 and the xbox?

How bout sticking to the USB idea instead of CD and using a Rom based memory to hold the actual OS/Game and a small 16MB flash to store game data. This would enable fast loading times and also offer the option for saving game stuff on the same usb device. Will be more costly than CD though.

[Adamant1988]

How bout sticking to the USB idea instead of CD and using a Rom based memory to hold the actual OS/Game and a small 16MB flash to store game data. This would enable fast loading times and also offer the option for saving game stuff on the same usb device. Will be more costly than CD though.

Probably not a dramatic increase in price, truth be told. Flash is getting to the point where it's becoming cheaper to put applications on USB thumb-drives.

[Lord Illidan]

What about the copy2ram code? If you've got a 200MB CD image, one could, in theory copy it all to RAM (assuming you have about 384MB for the whole uncompressed sys), and run it from there at full speed.

Yeah..and what about a DVD? Or multiple DVDs? Like UT 2004 for example?

[fletchinho]

To be honest this is the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard. Why would anyone want to boot his computer to play games? Not to mention unlike consoles, different computers have different specs. And speaking of which we already have game consoles to do all that!

[Adamant1988]

To be honest this is the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard. Why would anyone want to boot his computer to play games? Not to mention unlike consoles, different computers have different specs. And speaking of which we already have game consoles to do all that!

I would reboot my computer to play a game if it meant that all of my system resources could be dedicated to playing that game (resulting in superior performance). Yes, computers have different specs.. I don't see what you're getting at here...

Right, we have game consoles that do that.. game consoles with (usually) inferior hardware, but yet they excel at gaming because all of their hardware is doing NOTHING but running that game. Don't knock the idea before you try it.

[mips]

I would reboot my computer to play a game if it meant that all of my system resources could be dedicated to playing that game (resulting in superior performance). Yes, computers have different specs.. I don't see what you're getting at here...


Check this out, http://live.linux-gamers.net/

[zekopeko]

isn't there an application that just loads X essentials and starts the game?

i know it has X in the name but can't remember more.

here it is and guess what's the name :)

http://freshmeat.net/projects/xgame/