One of those monumental days ........

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Nov 04, 2005 at 12:04:48PM -0500, Robert Brockway wrote:
> To be honest I'd be surprised if they didn't hit that threshold a long 
> time ago.  The advantages of being able to build the game on an true OS 
> would be manyfold (hardware abstraction, no need to deal with memory 
> management, easier time debugging, etc).

Well certainly the PS1 had much faster availbility of games due to
having a nice set of system libraries for developers to use.  Later they
started doing things themselves as they got used to it and stripped out
parts of the libraries.  The PS2 didn't ship with a full set of handy
libraries and apparently many developers had a much harder time getting
going with coding on the PS2, which of course was also a much more
complex system on top of that, and again no OS, even worse yet no
standard libraries.  I haven't heard that the PS3 will have an OS, but
that doesn't mean some game maker couldn't try and use an OS of sorts
for all their game releases.  Of course anything that isn't essential
game code is potentially wasted cpu cycles.

The XBox certainly has an OS as far as I am aware.  It offers directX
and all that for the developers after all.  I imagine the XBox360 will too.

Lennart Sorensen
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