I’m looking up for communities or scenes whose purpose is making games that you play from bootup. Not necessarily boot sector games (stuff that has to fit in 512 bytes), but things that would behave much like cartridges in old consoles, where the hardware boots straight into the game.
Put another way, games that “are the OS”, either for x86 or ARM. My search engine-fu didn’t manage to find anything other than boot sector games and several Batocera guides.
That era or design is long gone. like even PS2/GameCube have firmware to let you change settings/manage memory cards without game disk. With the variety of hardware you can connect means you need to separate the software layer that talking to hardware’s from the game, thus the operating system. You can turn on GBA for example without a cartridge, but it would kinda just stuck. That’s like the last boot to game device I am aware of.
You’re talking about machines designed to work like that. OP is talking specifically about the current community of software developers that are, for fun, releasing games like that in 2023 for X86 and ARM.
There are versions of Tetris and other games designed to boot the system and start the game - no underlying operating system or anything else. It’s a challenge, and it’s fun.
ahhh, okay, I misunderstood the intention. that would be quite a challenge to design game like this.