Raspberry Pi 4 OpenBSD based home computer/gaming console
11 by alehyze | 2 comments on Hacker News.
When I started programming as a kid, I had a Commodore 64 and later an amiga 500. Those machines came with very simple software and expected you to write some, rather than giving you thousands of pre-made packages to learn and play with. A lot of existing software was video games. They were much simpler than those people play nowadays but they were still a lot of fun. Part of the fun was low latency. I started working on a gaming console based on the raspberry pi that would have the kind of low latency that older home computers and gaming consoles had, and found a way to do that. At some point, I realised that users would want to use a keyboard, read and write files, connect to the internet, stuff that is taken for granted with computers today. So I wanted not to run on bare metal anymore, I needed an OS. Writing one from scratch would take me years and it probably would not be as good as an existing one. But existing desktop operating systems tend not to be good for games, as they introduce latency and are able to stop a game at any time to do some other task, which can result in stuttering that the game developers cannot fully control or avoid. I modified the OpenBSD kernel for the raspberry pi with gaming related extensions, in such a way that when the game runs there is no latency and no stuttering. A game on my own fork of OpenBSD has the same performance of the bare metal code that I have written previously. And it can do file I/O, connect to the net and all that kind of stuff. And when you quit the game it's just like normal OpenBSD so you can program it and make games yourself, browse the web and do all sort of stuff. I am thinking that other people may want to have something like that, both for nostalgic reasons and for learning programming, so I thought of asking around and, if enough people like the idea, turn this into a product.
