What's the latest with Intel's Management Engine / Minix that runs on every Intel chipset? Is that still a thing? Did they harden it? Or can you still get access?
That... Shouldn’t be terribly difficult? Though I don’t believe UEFI has sound drivers (you’ll have problems writing one yourself because even frickin’ sound-codec chips have NDA-only datasheets these days), and the stupidest thing is that the “graphics output protocol” doesn’t indicate vsync so you can’t do tear-free blitting, which is literally worse than VGA.
About 10 years ago, it became "common knowledge" about mainboards that onboard sound has become good enough for almost anybody. It has never been true for me, maybe because my recent mainboards have been lower middle class (AMD B350 / B650) largely chosen for good CPU power converters.
Because my two (PC) laptops since 2020 have both had really damn good headphone outputs, I can believe that some good / expensive mainboards have it, too. It's not exotic technology anymore. Meanwhile, my desktop PC has a 20+ years old M-Audio prosumer card that also sounds great. (Now rigged with a PCIe -> PCI converter card off AliExpress)
Between these DACs and / or Chi-Fi class D amps (some of them with built-in DACs), nowadays you can spend 90% of the Hi-Fi budget on speakers. It's incredible how good electronics you can get for how cheap these days.
Bluetooth sucks against the raw codec of a soundcard. If you want lossy music, that's it.
But given autotune trends and how genz-ers grew up with shitty early smartphone loudspeakers and not much better BT ones they aren't used to proper music and their tastes are rot forever.
There are a lot of parallels: It has a janky set of buggy drivers. It has backslashes in paths. It has a shell that is "inspired" by COMMAND.COM. And it's basically a program loader where every program immediately replaces it and drives the hardware directly.
Except that UEFI supports loading PE executables which replace it and have direct access to hardware… so… not really BIOS-like. Some UEFI implementations provide BIOS compatibility, but that’s via an UEFI application whether provided by the implementer or via something like CSMWrap: https://github.com/CSMWrap/CSMWrap
I basically had this setup back in the day. I don't really know how I ended up with it, I was 7 at the time and none of it was intentional - but my bootloader had two entries: I could boot into Windows 98, or I could boot into Worms.
As far as I know, Worms is a normal DOS game, so the only way for that to happen should be a DOS install configured to just auto-start Worms on boot. Which makes sense as a way to keep a kid away from anything that could cause trouble.
I very vaguely recall that there used to be a very few PC games that worked as boot floppies and possibly didn't use DOS at all, but it was a rarity and Worms definitely wasn't one.
No, I set it up. My parents were non-technical. I had a CD-ROM re-release of Worms for DOS from one gaming magazine or another. I guess the installer set it up somewhere somehow but I remember it wasn't easy to get it installed and there were further problems trying to launch it. It's possible the installer itself was a DOS program, not a Windows program.
BIOS can only manage VESA which is much much slower than the capabilities of a modern GPU, so they might have meant graphical performance in regards to that.
VESA BIOS Extensions support direct framebuffer access in protected mode, and I don't imagine the lack of accelerated 2D operations would be a practical bottleneck when implementing NES-style graphics on modern PCs.
UEFI GOP additionally supports accelerated bitblt, but again YAGNI for 2D game performance at reasonable framerates on a modern PC.
Welcome to Amiga games, in many cases the floppy would contain the boot loader that would directly jump into the game.
At least on the Amiga 500 you would not go through the trouble to start Workbench, only to load the game, unless you were a lucky owner of an external hard drive.
Your comment said "welcome to Amiga games", as if it were unique to Amiga. The context of the thread is PC, where they had their own booter/bare-metal games.
So you don't have to go to "Amiga games world", you're already in the proper world.
And yet, your little slice of the world doesn't represent the world at whole.
If you're ignorant of the situation, maybe don't come out with such a self-centered (and arguably, arrogant) statement; and especially don't double down on it when corrected.
I recall many IBM-PC games are bootable games. I inserted a floppy , resets the computer, and then it directly boots into the game. The disk must contain a boot sector and drivers and such.
As well, although I think in the Amiga this was more common, to buy games that were already prepared like this.
At least on my circle for doing the same with PC games, we built the floppies ourselves, then again, it could be a side effect that you could hardly buy any legal games in Portugal during those days, even regular shops would sell pirated games as originals.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op...