OSes suck
I am sick of playing nice. Messages suck, threads suck, and penguins suck. I want to do what I want when I want. Alas, I also like 3d cards. Am I doomed to be under Bill's or Linus' iron grip? Maybe not...
I've come up with an idea for a new OS geared towards demos. What does "geared towards demos" mean? I remember back in the good old days of Hornet a time when the demoscene could code circles around the games industry. Trixter's PC Demos Explained put it best: "[Demos] seemingly do things that aren't possible on the machine they were programmed on." Obviously, you can't share the processor if you're doing the impossible. So geared towards demos means something along the lines of "giving the coder complete control of the machine to create his magic."
Well, what does this wonder OS do? Not very much. It'll load programs, maybe provide some console I/O routines, and perform the occasional page swap. That's it. No memory management, no process control, no file system. You get a whole big empty memory space to play with. Since there's only one process, there's not very much to control. Most (good) demos only have one or two datafiles, so why not include them in the executable?
As you might have guessed, this spartan kernel doesn't have much in the way of a GUI. Or a command line for that matter. Basically, you'd copy a demo you want to run to a small partition on your hard disk, reboot your machine, and be amazed.
Of course, none of this resolves the 3d hardware issue. Considering that 3Dfx has open sourced Glide, and NVidia is going to be releasing sources to the TNT/TNT2 X server soon, it shouldn't be so bad to write some drivers for this stuff. Simple drivers. Not much more than polygon drawing and texture management. (That's what pissed me off about DirectX so much... too many "features.") Of course, there'd also be sound drivers that would provide buffer playing capability.
So there it is: an unobtrusive kernel that has sound and video card support built into it. Please send me your feedback so that we could get a project like this going. And just think: one day we may put these stupid OS wars behind us and get back to demo coding!