vengeance

"Vengeance" is the [potential marketing] name I coined for this idea. Why not develop computer games that BOOTs up on your PC. I know, I know - PCs are all different and they don't have common hardware like consoles do. But these days PCs with even the most basic GeForce card have enough of a lowest common denominator to make the idea feasable and give consoles a run for their money. Compatability issues aside, I think it would still be worth it. Obviously what needs to be developed is some sort of micro-kernel - maybe nVidia could make one for their Cg language ( http://developer.nvidia.com/page/cg_main.html ). Cg runs almost entirely on the graphics chip anyway and apparently it will support other geometry processing cards such as ones from ATI too. If you have games that completely bypass monolithic kernels (that's actually th technical term for kernels like kernel32.dll), then performance should go through the roof. Who knows, maybe having less OS-related dependencies, you may even achieve a better compatability factor. I like the idea of a pure games kernel. Different kernel modules (being that it's a micro-kernel) can be optionally loaded by developer if they wanted networking or whatever. Maybe the makers of Vengeance could start with FreeBSD - it has the right kind of licence and it has a microkernel I believe. You could start by stripping it right back and then getting Cg to support it. I'm not actually a C programmer so I wouldn't know how to do all this myself.

I called it "Vengeance" in lieu of the idea that PC take revenge on consoles for stealing games like Halo ;) Besides, it sounds angry and all...