| GRUB (multiboot) Mednafen Project [message #3115] |
Sun, 07 July 2013 04:16  |
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I have an idea.
Has anyone played Grub Invaders?. I have. It loads at boot, instead of an operating system. The game is rudimentary, like seriously rudimentary. It gives you the impression of a prototype.
I was thinking of something more complex: mednafen at boot, instead of an operating system. Technologically I don't think this is too hard at the moment. We have plenty of video drivers. We have reusable kernel modules for game controllers. We could build a minimal mednafen-only distribution for people to install on their arcade simulators.
As a demonstration (and to get some much needed coding practice) I'm going to set aside a little time to adapt the code of GRUB Invaders to run GRUB Tetris, guided by the original Tetris program. This could take me a long time 
In the mean time, let's talk about booting directly to mednafen and playing games. What can we use that's already out there? SDL? built-in FOSS OpenGL drivers? How minimal a kernel would we need? I'm familiar with linux, but not freebsd or other options.
I imagine the process like this:Install grub-mednafen
Reboot
Boot to Grub-Mednafen Configuration Guide
Check keyboard and mouse layout (en-us/ja-jp, right/left handed) -
Check controller connections (joysticks, midi, usb, bluetooth, etc) -
Verify Screen Size and Quality (text rows/cols, vga resolution, sdl/opengl resolution) Mednafen Game/System Selection Menu
Select Game
Play Game? / Options?
Go.
What do you think? I like the idea of doing calibration with minigames. It's important that users enjoy doing it if they're going to have to do it. Giving users the responsibility of confinguring their own graphics drivers, screen resolution, and device configurations ensures that things will work the way they want them to. Although I encourage the use of healthy defaults and autoconfiguration (ala mupen64plus's automatic controller configuration). The calibration games serve to verify that chosen defaults are correct. It's important to minimize users having to make changes themselves, so when it does happen record a script and save it somewhere for the next boot (usb/sdcard/whatever).
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| Re: GRUB (multiboot) Mednafen Project [message #3116 is a reply to message #3115 ] |
Sun, 07 July 2013 04:20  |
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Another reason for doing this:
Anyone ever play SimCity 2000 for DOS? Before the emulator era?
Do you remember having to make a bootdisk to run SimCity 2k with minimal drivers to get enough performance out of your sloooooww pc?
I did. Running SC2K from bootdisk was way better than trying to run it in Windows 95 later on.
Imagine the performance that mendafen would have available to it with no unneeded software of any kind running in the background, no unneeded drivers bogging down memory, and a kernel 1/3rd the size of a standard pc distribution's.
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| Re: GRUB (multiboot) Mednafen Project [message #3119 is a reply to message #3115 ] |
Mon, 08 July 2013 00:27 |
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Ideally, I'd like mednafen to run as it's own kernel without the the need for linux or another to rely on. This would provide mednafen with optimal resources to work with and minimal need for configuration.
The trick is getting it to work.
Anybody doing boot-to-emulator with mednafen or another at the moment? Using upstart scripts or sysv-init? systemd?
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| Re: GRUB (multiboot) Mednafen Project [message #3125 is a reply to message #3119 ] |
Fri, 12 July 2013 09:51 |
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You might want to try out RetroArch in KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) mode. You need Linux and a GPU with a capable driver (Radeon HD cards with the open-source drivers seem to work fine). The way I understand it, an application in KMS mode speaks directly to the driver, removing any need for X, window managers and all that.
It's not exactly what you were asking for, but if you like the "console feel" this is probably as close to that as you're going to get. You could do something similar to OpenELEC, with a minimal kernel that does just what you want, only it will boot to RetroArch instead of X and XBMC. This is actually just what I want to do for myself. I just need to find and save up for a small and quiet PC and figure out how to glue everything together.
[Updated on: Fri, 12 July 2013 09:52]
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| Re: GRUB (multiboot) Mednafen Project [message #3143 is a reply to message #3125 ] |
Mon, 29 July 2013 00:01 |
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| sparklewind wrote on Fri, 12 July 2013 23:51 |
find and save up for a small and quiet PC and figure out how to glue everything together.
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Thanks for the reply and the idea! I'm kind of in the same boat, but more lacking time than finances. Something along the lines of OpenELEC or MythTV is what I have in mind for the front end. The harder part will be the automated calibration I want to add (programs based on grub-invaders), and boot to an OS in two stages.
My hope is that the system can boot in a mostly seamless way from off to game selection without the need for any setup, and to make any necessary setup part of the initialization process which doesn't require complicated understanding of the machine or configuration methods.
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| Re: GRUB (multiboot) Mednafen Project [message #3178 is a reply to message #3143 ] |
Sun, 08 September 2013 03:55 |
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Check out http://forum.xbmc.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=194
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