Bypassing OS

[Nikhil]

Would it be possible to set up games so once they have been installed, when you run them, it would shut down the OS and use some very basic program to run the game? When you exit, the OS would be rebooted.

This would solve the problem of the OS eating up processing power and memory that could be used on the game. Old computers could play fairly advanced games. Is it possible to write a program that would do this? Or have companies start making games with this feature?

[Grayhawkz]

yes windown vista or longhorn is already going to do this. Along with many other features. For now the best u can do is just open up your task manager and exit out of all processes that arent critical for u.

[JordanL]

I very much doubt that this will ever be used on anything but consoles, as the program would have to be written with instructions on how to use and operate every possible hardware configuration possible, (something normally handled by the OS).

I don't trust that MS would hand over that much hardware control to any program, not even their own.

[tomatoSoup]

No - this could never happen.

The game relies on Windows for its disk access.
The game relies on Windows for its internet access.
The game relies on Windows for its graphics (DirectX/OpenGL).
The game relies on Windows for its memory management.
The game relies on Windows for lots and lots of things.

Windows provides the hardware (e.g. gfx card) and software (OpenGL) support for the games.

Some games are unreliable enough as it is (hello EA!). Thank goodness they don't have to worry about all these things :wink:

If you are depsperate then dual-boot a couple of Windows XP installs.
Keep one install very minimal - don't install unneccessary devices like your printer or install any apps (besides your games). And read a guide on which services you can stop.

[Grayhawkz]

Its going to be an option is Windows Vista.... go to the Guru3d forums and ask.

[Smily0012]

No - this could never happen.

The game relies on Windows for its disk access.
The game relies on Windows for its internet access.
The game relies on Windows for its graphics (DirectX/OpenGL).
The game relies on Windows for its memory management.
The game relies on Windows for lots and lots of things.

Windows provides the hardware (e.g. gfx card) and software (OpenGL) support for the games.

Some games are unreliable enough as it is (hello EA!). Thank goodness they don't have to worry about all these things :wink:

If you are depsperate then dual-boot a couple of Windows XP installs.
Keep one install very minimal - don't install unneccessary devices like your printer or install any apps (besides your games). And read a guide on which services you can stop.

Actually it only relies on software. openGL is really not supported by MS, in sense they trying to kill it by make DirectX primary and crippling OpenGL.

[JordanL]

No - this could never happen.

The game relies on Windows for its disk access.
The game relies on Windows for its internet access.
The game relies on Windows for its graphics (DirectX/OpenGL).
The game relies on Windows for its memory management.
The game relies on Windows for lots and lots of things.

Windows provides the hardware (e.g. gfx card) and software (OpenGL) support for the games.

Some games are unreliable enough as it is (hello EA!). Thank goodness they don't have to worry about all these things :wink:

If you are depsperate then dual-boot a couple of Windows XP installs.
Keep one install very minimal - don't install unneccessary devices like your printer or install any apps (besides your games). And read a guide on which services you can stop.

Actually it only relies on software. openGL is really not supported by MS, in sense they trying to kill it by make DirectX primary and crippling OpenGL.

Actually, he's right, and that's what I was saying too. Games don't know how to access the harddrive or address RAM fully. There are a lot of hardware problems with handing games full control of the hardware.

[Hezz]

It would be very interesting if someone developed a game for the PC that required a dedicated PC that didn't have another OS. In theory this could be done but the game would have to operate all the necessary systems. I see no reason why you could not have a boot loader similar to what is used for loading different OS choices. You select Windows or Linux or the game. Or in the alternative the game disk could be a bootable disk that the bios detects and if it is present it loads the game OS instead of the general purpose OS which is on a hard disk.

The weakness of this is that you would have to turn off the machine and reboot when ever you changed games but sometimes under Windows you have to do this anyway to get the next game to run smoothly.


Wow, imagine what they could do if the game had direct access to all hardware without Windows. THe problem would be that the game would need a lot of smarts to deal with various kinds of hardware.

However, it would be cool if a company did something like this. They build a high end gaming PC and develope several game titles for it. It is a set system of hardware and can run any OS when you don't boot up to the game directly.

Wow, I just gave Sony the concept for the PS4.

[Hunnter]

I guess the OS could have some sort of handler for all the hardware operations, and remove everything else from RAM
But this brings many problems in itself...the main one is of course the fact that it IS actually bypassing the OS to run almost fully on the hardware...

Just think for a second, how easy do you think it would be for some hacker to take advantage of this?
When that happens, there will be a seriously BAD opening in Windows just sitting there waiting to be attacked.

Making a game that will use the hardware fully is basically the whole idea behind consoles..see where im going now?
If MS do this, why would anyone want to buy consoles...which they happen to have out just now so they will attack themselves with this feature....

So if they do indeed add this to Vista, then they better make sure they patched up all holes so nothing can take advantage of this, but its impossible unless they have to get some verification code from MS to use this feature.
But of course, hackers will get this eventually, if you can crack a generator software for trials/shareware, you will be able to break through this security easily unless MS have somehow jumped a few years ahead of everyone with security...pfft hahaha, as if :lol: