OSDev.org

Whilst OS Development interested me, I found my hobby kernel was going absolutly nowhere, turning into something which would just be forgotten. In an attempt to revive it, I came upon the idea of creating a games console.

So far, I have ripped up two old computers from our garage (by old I'm talking running Windows 95), and stripped them bare of their components. Using one of the old motherboards (processor attached), a graphics card (supports 32 bit color), a keyboard, two floppy disk drives (one will contain the disk for the operating system the other will be for the games) and an old power supply unit, I managed to boot a simple operating system which I had burnt to a floppy (I also managed to boot Windows 95 from an old hard disk aswell). The coding of the operating system which the console will run is not really in progress, but I have planned out what it will need and it shouldn't be too difficult:
- Bootloader (GRUB)
- Kernel basics (GDT/IDT/ISRs/IRQs/PIC etc)
- Keyboard driver (Already written a couple, the keyboard can act as a gamepad)
- RTC driver (Not necessary, but might aswell)
- VESA Driver (Or just get GRUB to set the VBE mode, depends how bothered I am)
- Graphics library (Will probably go with GLUT for OpenGL, some nice games written for that)
- Paging (Must have for executing games)
- Multitasking (Would be nice but I don't think it is essential, will probably do it anyway)
- Floppy Disk Driver with FAT filesystem support (For loading the games)

I'll try and keep this thread updated with any pictures (which should come as soon as I locate my digital camera), new ideas or code snippets I have. Stage One of the project will be considered finished when it can load and play a snake game (which I will write after I have developed the kernel).

I have decided to name the console DarkTerminal and I think it will be turned into a tutorial for people who wish to build their own games console, I have already found a similar project called XGameStation (http://www.XGameStation.com/), which looks quite interesting. I plan to potentially make some money from writing articles about DarkTerminal in computing and gaming magazines and I may even write a book titled "Build your own games console in a day!", or something along those lines. Now that gaming is such an important genre, I think this sort of thing will be of interest to many people.

Please post suggestions and ideas for development as they would be of great use.

Interesting idea. Some thoughts:
* What about sound support?
* You can't do hardware accelerated OpenGL on VESA, you'll need to do software rendering (SLOW!) or write 3D graphics drivers (Hard, mostly undocumented).
* Only floppy disks? I know the demoscene do very impressive stuff in a few kb, but 1.44MB is very small nowadays

And there's the question of practicality: If you have a PC that already runs Windows etc, why turn it into something that's less flexible like a games console? (Not trying to turn this into PC vs Consoles flamewar!)

I think it is not really bad idea to program a console OS to be use on normal computer. Modern console OS like ps3 system software is nice and has a lot of functionality too. If someone able to make it real, you can turn every PC into console but driver could be a big problem.

froggey wrote:Interesting idea. Some thoughts:

And there's the question of practicality: If you have a PC that already runs Windows etc, why turn it into something that's less flexible like a games console? (Not trying to turn this into PC vs Consoles flamewar!)

I've seen advantage of console over normal PC. Example, you can play CPU-intensive games like the latest Star Wars game which not available to PC user just because it is too CPU intensive. You can achieve this on PC only by applying console's work principle.

Thanks for the ideas, I wasn't planning on any graphics acceleration because it was only meant to run the most simple of games (Snake, Space Invaders, Tetris etc...) which Is also why I opted for floppy disk games. Sound is a good idea though, come to think of it I have a few sound cards lying around aswell so I'll see what I can do.

Also, I want to write my own kernel for it because firstly, you get a greater satisfaction when you know you did it all by yourself and two, if I'm turning it into a tutorial for how to build your own console, asking the user to install Windows 95 onto an old computer then plug and play isn't really the same.

Thanks again.

It doesn't matter about the complexity of the software, unaccelerated OpenGL rendering will be slow on older hardware... it's even slow on moderately new hardware.

You are many year's behind, me and a team of coders started making a PC games console OS, many moon's a go http://www.dex4u.com
Your welcome to join, if you find starting from scrach, getting too much for you.
Anyway good luck.

Thanks for the offer but I prefer coding in C to ASM, also, I'm only doing it as an experiement, graphics acceleration is far from necessary and speed isn't really an issue, its just supposed to be something which people can do for a project to make use of some old junk lying around.

What about a single-tasking OS that load games from floppy or cd/dvd drive like ps2 and that's all, no other functions. Is it exists? Sound stupid and probably, nobody will ever need it.

Or place the computer in a minimal ready-to-use 32-bit protected state and write a C game library for running on bare metal. My redesigned OS, although a microkernel, will be designed from the beginning to have a low latency mode where the game has near 100% usage of the CPU.