uncharted wrote:
weirdami wrote:
So, I got to wondering if the Commodore 64 OS, whatever that is, was able to work on these fancy quad core dealies, would it be capable of having something like Halflife run on it. I mean like is there something in the OS that would make it not possible or is it just that the hardware is too slow? Does the OS really matter?
You don't NEED an OS for a single application or game, you could just hit the hardware directly. If Valve were insane they could have released a non-OS version of HL2 that drove all the hardware directly, but the amount of work required would have been huge. Back in the day, when you were looking at a single, static hardware platform such as the Amiga, ditching the OS and banging the hardware made sense. Now you really need the abstraction of the OS to be able to support all of your potential customers. You also really need the OS to be able to multitask.
All the game developers really use the OS for is as a nice big HAL... The OS is just one big hardware driver. :-)
Most of the other services offered by an OS not important... Thus the minimal OSs supplied with Game Consoles...
