All that's left now is SDL for UEFI, and then all our games can run in a pre-OS environment.

What's the latest with Intel's Management Engine / Minix that runs on every Intel chipset? Is that still a thing? Did they harden it? Or can you still get access?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op...

	▲	ssl-3 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You're missing the most important question: Can the Intel Management Engine run Doom?

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BirAdam 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well… UEFI is kind of modern DOS.

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lnx01 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It certainly is not.

	▲	rwmj 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There are a lot of parallels: It has a janky set of buggy drivers. It has backslashes in paths. It has a shell that is "inspired" by COMMAND.COM. And it's basically a program loader where every program immediately replaces it and drives the hardware directly.

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mananaysiempre 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That... Shouldn’t be terribly difficult? Though I don’t believe UEFI has sound drivers (you’ll have problems writing one yourself because even frickin’ sound-codec chips have NDA-only datasheets these days), and the stupidest thing is that the “graphics output protocol” doesn’t indicate vsync so you can’t do tear-free blitting, which is literally worse than VGA.

	▲	DiabloD3 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Most support Intel HDA. The problem is that people don't use onboard audio anymore (because its incredibly and audibly noisy). They use USB or Bluetooth. Bluetooth absolutely isn't standardized and is a mess, and USB miiiiiiight be okay if you limit to a subset of EHCI and USB Audio Class 1.0 devices. At this point, its easier to just use Linux and run your game as pid 1.

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chaps 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That honestly sounds amazing. Imagine booting into something like a grub menu that's just a list of classic games.

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Xirdus 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I basically had this setup back in the day. I don't really know how I ended up with it, I was 7 at the time and none of it was intentional - but my bootloader had two entries: I could boot into Windows 98, or I could boot into Worms.

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Dwedit 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's a similar idea, but that's a DOS menu. At the point when the menu appears, MS-DOS 7.1 has already been loaded.

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tetrisgm 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Stupid question but... would bundling the binary with an ASM port of something that could run this technically make it possible to run without the OS?

I realize this is basically doing docker for DOS games and incredibly stupid, I'm just curious about the thought experiment

	▲	Xirdus 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, the "ASM port of something that could run this" would be the OS...

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dale_glass 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Probably your parents setting it up?

As far as I know, Worms is a normal DOS game, so the only way for that to happen should be a DOS install configured to just auto-start Worms on boot. Which makes sense as a way to keep a kid away from anything that could cause trouble.

I very vaguely recall that there used to be a very few PC games that worked as boot floppies and possibly didn't use DOS at all, but it was a rarity and Worms definitely wasn't one.

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Induane 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I bet it wasn't actually the bootloader but something with autoexec.bat - you could setup choices in it and windows was just one launch option.

	▲	Xirdus 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, if you treat DOS as a bootloader for Windows 98 - which it was actually - then modifying autoexec.bat would count as setting up the bootloader.

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Xirdus 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No, I set it up. My parents were non-technical. I had a CD-ROM re-release of Worms for DOS from one gaming magazine or another. I guess the installer set it up somewhere somehow but I remember it wasn't easy to get it installed and there were further problems trying to launch it. It's possible the installer itself was a DOS program, not a Windows program.

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4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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queuebert 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I would guess a modern BIOS chip is as powerful as an NES, right?

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snazz 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You can do substantially more in UEFI than NES-level games. (See https://uefi.org/specs/UEFI/2.9_A/12_Protocols_Console_Suppo...)

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fluoridation 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What do you mean by "BIOS chip"? Like, the flash memory that stores the motherboard's firmware? I don't think that contains any processing elements.

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sedatk 6 hours ago | parent [-]

BIOS can only manage VESA which is much much slower than the capabilities of a modern GPU, so they might have meant graphical performance in regards to that.

	▲	jasomill 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		VESA BIOS Extensions support direct framebuffer access in protected mode, and I don't imagine the lack of accelerated 2D operations would be a practical bottleneck when implementing NES-style graphics on modern PCs. UEFI GOP additionally supports accelerated bitblt, but again YAGNI for 2D game performance at reasonable framerates on a modern PC.

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pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Welcome to Amiga games, in many cases the floppy would contain the boot loader that would directly jump into the game.

At least on the Amiga 500 you would not go through the trouble to start Workbench, only to load the game, unless you were a lucky owner of an external hard drive.

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markus_zhang 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I recall many IBM-PC games are bootable games. I inserted a floppy , resets the computer, and then it directly boots into the game. The disk must contain a boot sector and drivers and such.

	▲	pjmlp 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		As well, although I think in the Amiga this was more common, to buy games that were already prepared like this. At least on my circle for doing the same with PC games, we built the floppies ourselves, then again, it could be a side effect that you could hardly buy any legal games in Portugal during those days, even regular shops would sell pirated games as originals.