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:
much more memory, and better processors (486s!) that could use it
games starting to want hardware acceleration for 3D, and therefore need graphics card drivers, which were impractical to fit on a floppy disk, usually
Windows 95 / DirectX meant that people wanted to play games by double-clicking them, and there being a “unified” way of accessing hardware, rather than directly writing to VGA- / SoundBlaster- compatible hardware.
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.
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.