I was thinking about how Linux may be the platform of choice for game developement. First let me ask this question and I expect mature answers from experienced developers. At the time of DOS, which was the only target for games, if there was Linux in its current state, would game developers choose it over DOS? If YES the we are taking seriously the better OS, if Linux is really better than DOS in terms of gaming. If NO then we are targeting the more spread OS, in that case we had DOS. But again would Linux be more popular among gamers/users at DOS time?

At the time of DOS, DOS was not the target for games.

When DOS was reigning supreme, the game OS of choice was either the Macintosh, the Amiga, or the Atari ST. Those three platforms offered colour graphics, sound, and specialized processing chips to offload processing, as well as a faster core CPU and a simpler programming model (expanded vs. extended memory, anyone?).

Prior to the 16-bit platforms, the Atari, Commodore, and Apple 8-bit computers were the reigning kings.

Not only was DOS not the target of choice for games, but the non-DOS machines were treated with derision by "serious" computer folks as "games machines." Times have changed, and now DOS-based Windows is the only "games machine" on the market (consoles aside). The irony is delicious to us old timers.

I remember when the 80386 chip was introduced. You could run DOS on it, with 16-colour ANSI graphics games (unless you only had a Hercules card for B&W text), or you could load Unix running an X server and get glorious full-colour graphics games like xconq.

By the time the 486 hit the scene, Windows for Workgroups was available with its 16-colour chunky slow graphics, but so was Linux with it's X server and glorious 16-bit colour. Neither could really compete with the Mac, and the Atari and Amiga were already doomed.

But, people could steal DOS+Windows from work or 'share' it from their friends, so it spread like buttocks at a doughnut-lovers convention. It was harder to program for, it was less stable, it provided poorer quality graphics and sound (if any) than Linux or the other available platforms, but it was ubiquitous and available on every desktop.

So, in short, no. Linux _was_ pretty much in its current state, but developers chose DOS because it was the 'more spread OS'. Marketing wins over engineering every time. Wal-Mart vs. Quality.

DOS was not really a target for games, but not because of those rants.

The ironic thing about the heyday of DOS was that programmers routinely ignored it for everything except disk i/o. Video hardware was driven directly by the app because support for graphics in DOS was essentially nil. If I recall you could do mode changes and setpixel and that was pretty much it and even then it was limited to a handful of modes. What "DOS games" were really targeting was a hardware platform, the OS was nearly irrelevant.

When 16-bit Windows came along it standardized an API that made it easy to write relatively simple graphics apps and share the screen. However a side effect is that was that video drivers had to be supplied by the hardware vendor which in turn encouraged them to create proprietary and undocumented hardware interfaces. Business graphics apps didn't really care but the added overhead of not being able to program to the bare metal anymore meant that there were essentially no native Windows games (other than resource-lite stuff like simple puzzle games, etc). The big games of this time were still DOS and Windows would essentially switch itself off while they were running. The need to get over this hurdle was basically what kicked off what would end up as DirectDraw.

It's only in recent times, about the latter half of the PS1's lifecycle, that we have seen PC games overtake Console games in quality and quantity. In their days, the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, etc, were all the most powerful graphics rendering systems available on the consumer market. The PC as a gaming platform was made possible almost exclusively by the efforts of companies like nVidia who split from SGI in order to market consumer graphics rendering hardware. In fact, OpenGL has been helped by gaming more than it has helped gaming, as it was originally designed as a network pipe rendering system, harkening to a day when bandwidth was cheaper than processing time. It was picked up by hardware vendors mainly for it's relative ease of implementation and maturity over other systems available at the time.

Quote: Original post by Bregma
At the time of DOS, DOS was not the target for games.

When DOS was reigning supreme, the game OS of choice was either the Macintosh, the Amiga, or the Atari ST.

As far as I remember those times, there was a time, a short time, DOS games were indeed very popular and were more popular than those home computer systems. This was the time shortly after Wolf 3D, when the 386 CPU became affordable. A lot of popular games and applications were released for DOS. Some examples: Microsoft Space Simulator, MS Flight Simulator 4, Doom. These were ground-breaking.
In these times only a very small group of users had ever used Linux, and the mainstream had never ever heard of the name.

Quote: Original post by Marmin

Quote: Original post by Bregma
At the time of DOS, DOS was not the target for games.

When DOS was reigning supreme, the game OS of choice was either the Macintosh, the Amiga, or the Atari ST.

DOS games were indeed very popular and were more popular than those home computer systems. This was the time shortly after Wolf 3D, when the 386 CPU became affordable. A lot of popular games and applications were released for DOS. Some examples: Microsoft Space Simulator, MS Flight Simulator 4, Doom. These were ground-breaking.

That's true. And I belive that even when short, it was a pretty intense time. More than it ever was for Mac or Amiga (World-Widely speaking).

It was the Glorious time of 'DOS Protected Mode' and some DOS protection system called 'Diskreet' . A teenagers we laughed about that cuz in Dutch it could translate as 'Disc Ass' .

Quote: Original post by Bregma
I remember when the 80386 chip was introduced. You could run DOS on it, with 16-colour ANSI graphics games (unless you only had a Hercules card for B&W text), or you could load Unix running an X server and get glorious full-colour graphics games like xconq.

VGA became standard on the 386. 256 color mode (out of 262144), ie mode 13, was standard for DOS games at the time.

Quote: Original post by Bregma
By the time the 486 hit the scene, Windows for Workgroups was available with its 16-colour chunky slow graphics, but so was Linux with it's X server and glorious 16-bit colour. Neither could really compete with the Mac, and the Atari and Amiga were already doomed.

SVGA cards became standard at the time of the 486. Through VESA, one could access reasonable resolutions in true color, or at least in 64k mode. It wasn't fast, but nothing graphic related was fast back then. Mode 13 was still the mode of choice for FPS games. Windows 3.1(1) was never a target for games, but DOS most certainly was.

Quote: Original post by Bregma
So, in short, no. Linux _was_ pretty much in its current state, but developers chose DOS because it was the 'more spread OS'. Marketing wins over engineering every time. Wal-Mart vs. Quality.

Incorrect. Linux was at a highly embryonic stage back then. It's only became 'useable' for games a couple of years ago, with the advent of hardware 3D.

It was most certainly not game ready back then. The whole X server model made real time games a pain in the ass because of its extreme inefficiency. The first attempts to resolve this problem on Linux were SVGALIB, which essentially emulated DOS graphics. Later on, DRI attempted to solve the performance issue more consistently, and failed. Today, hardware 3D has implicitely solved the issue, although the flawed X server concept is still haunting Linux.

In fact, DOS was a very popular game OS in that time. And not a bad one either. The lack of multitasking made things much easier (no message pumps, no time slicing, no memory protection). Graphics API were reasonably standarized (mode 13, VESA). Sound was a problem, but defacto standards such as Soundblaster or GUS alleviated the problem somewhat.

The 80286 times were the dark age, were everything was 16 color and ugly. The 386 and VGA cards changed all that. I remember my shock when I, a proud Amiga owner, first saw Monkey Island (and later Indiana Jones 4) on the PC. Compared to a mere VGA card, the Amiga was just ugly. Followed a short period of cognitive dissonance, that quickly resolved into the purchase of a DOS based PC.

DOS was only a target platform for games, because windows was widely spread.
so was dos, since windows was based on dos.

but under windows, it was impossible to do gaming, because it was too slow.
this is why many game-coders made use of the dos's x-mode (mode 13).

this was a major drawback of windows, so microsoft decided to develope an api that allows lower-level hardware access to speed up things: this is why directx was born.

but direct x was a hell for all game-developers, so they continued making games using dos until directx reached version 3.0 (i think?), where it was usable for the first time.

linux/unix and co. were no target platform because of the lack of drivers that supported hardware acceleration, and this is still a major drawback.

I don't see Linux users (who at this moment in time are highly technical people and therefore a very small market) paying for games. The Linux folks that I deal (personally and professionally) with bristle at the very thought of having to pay for any software. And until a non-technical person, or casual computer user, can install, and get up and running on the internet, Linux with as much 'difficulty' as Windows, it will not be a viable solution to those people. Also, there are driver issues to contend with especially for graphics cards - the support just isn't as solid as it is with Windows (again, because of the small market). As a business person you target the largest market possible, even if you don't agree with it (I love Macs, and I was an Amiga person too!).