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PC OS Gaming Platform

Lean PC OS written for gamers and/or students
 
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Wouldn’t it be nice to have an OS platform that was written entirely for games? Microsoft hasn’t really tried to create an OS that would be “lean and mean” with out all of the other options that you normally see. There are so many programs loaded when you first start windows that it bogs everything down.

Yes it would be a lot like a playstation or game cube. But it would be much more then that because you could still write a term paper, game online, or serf the net if you needed to. I believe it’s an untapped market that would go over very well.

Dino875, Aug 29 2003

XBox keyboard adapter http://www.electric...er.com/xboxkeyb.htm
It exists, since it was needed to play Phantasy Star Online. [krelnik, Oct 04 2004]

[link]






       Interesting idea. Let's make it green and black and we'll call it something catchy, like...maybe.. something Gen-X...I know! "XBox". Dude, we're gonna make millions!

Keep this under your hat though, dude. We don't want anyone jumping our bandwagon...
DeathNinja, Aug 29 2003
  

       XBox, PlayStation, GameCube, whatever. Any of them *could* have a word processor, it's just that no one has written one for them.
phoenix, Aug 29 2003
  

       Baked: simply boot up Linux on your Playstation 2.   

       For the less Unix savvy, I think [phoenix] has described the solution. Put out a "game" for the XBox that includes a simple word processor, a calculator, a web browser and one or two other handy tools. XBox is probably your best platform because it comes bundled with Ethernet and a hard drive, so document storage, network printing and web browsing are pretty much gimmes. The problem would be getting Microsoft to OK you as an authorized XBox developer, as they would probably view you as a competitor to Office.
krelnik, Aug 29 2003
  

       You can get USB adapters for XBox. Keyboard, mouse, the works. Same for PS2. If you have an ethernet printer you're set...
DeathNinja, Aug 29 2003
  

       Yes, the controller ports on the XBox are actually just disguised USB ports, so a keyboard is not hard. You just need an adapter cable, and it turns out they already exist. See link.
krelnik, Aug 29 2003
  

       Uh, the problem with the current consoles is that their hardware is pathetic compared to most PCs. Who cares if you could word-process on an XBox? I'd rather be able to play a game like Half-Life 2 on a 3ghz, 1gb ram, Radeon9800 monstrosity without the worthless overhead of a traditional OS.
t4, Aug 31 2003
  

       An XBox has a 733 Mhz Pentium 3, an 8 Gig hard drive, an NVidia 3D accelerator, and 64M of RAM. That's not top of the line, but I wouldn't call it pathetic. Its certainly plenty to run decent games or a word processor.
krelnik, Aug 31 2003
  

       Heh, yeah for a console they're not bad specs, but at the LANs I attend I'm considered to have a pathetic slow machine, and I have twice the processing power, and 4 times the amount of ram!   

       XPoxes and other consoles get away with being a bit slow because the OS and all the games are optimised for that exact hardware configuration. I understand why you would propose this [Dino875], indeed, I've thought about it in the past myself. The problem is, in order to have the latest cutting edge hardware and interchangeability (that's why we PC gamers love our platform, is it not?), our OS needs to be a little more intelligent.   

       That said, there's already lots of tweaking software aimed specifically at gamers out there, and you could always go through your startup and remove all of the rogue unnecessary CPU slutting processes. Unfortunately, both of these options give you much less of a performance gain than you would imagine.
RoboBust, Sep 01 2003
  

       I’ve tried to disable some of the worthless admin services and networking services that Microsoft likes have running after installs, but it’s inevitable that you can’t do something else with it later. I couldn’t run some programs on a LAN but they would work fine on the internet. We even had a situation where the LAN games worked great but slowly started to stall and eventually freeze. We reinstalled one of the games and couldn’t join anyone else on the land. Even when we gave up and went to start the service back up, some of the service would get stuck trying to start up.   

       All I’m looking for is a secure plat form that doesn’t care about user log-ins or security. I’m looking for a bare OS that can run and load any PC software (including firewall, virus scanners, etc…) so all the system is working on is what I’m doing on the screen and what ever else in needs to do to keep the computer alive. If Microsoft would have an install option to load NOTHING but what is needed. Let the install worry about activating other services. If they don’t know what the service does, they don’t need to load it.
Dino875, Sep 23 2003
  

       They do, it's called embedded windows.
bristolz, Sep 23 2003
  
      
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