Looking at how chonky his wrist is, I suspect that “original OP” is quite a big lad and that this isn’t his first schnitzel sandwich. Suspect it’s more “plump thumb” than a double-joint.

As well as running as root, you can also disable kernel-level protections against Spectre and shit like that on Arch, which as far as I can tell doesn’t even gain you a single FPS. But no real gamer would turn that optimisation down.

Indeed. Back in the day (by which I mean, up until about when Doom was released, around '93) then one of the “joys” of PC gaming was that you had fuck all memory and had to prepare a “boot disk” for every game, bypassing the operating system, basically to load as little as possible so that there was space for your game to run. Trying to fit the bare essential drivers - sound card, memory extender, CD ROM if you needed it for that game, mouse or joystick if you needed those - was a right fucking adventure every time, and it was always a toss-up whether you could get sound, music, or both, in any particular game.

If you’re an old fart, or if you’ve ever used DosBox to play retro games, you might be familiar. DosBox makes it altogether too easy - loads of RAM and disk space, emulates anything, and it’s very quick to swap things out.

A few things changed around that time:

• much more memory, and better processors (486s!) that could use it
• games starting to want hardware acceleration for 3D, and therefore need graphics card drivers, which were impractical to fit on a floppy disk, usually
• Windows 95 / DirectX meant that people wanted to play games by double-clicking them, and there being a “unified” way of accessing hardware, rather than directly writing to VGA- / SoundBlaster- compatible hardware.

I’m no Windows fan, but it was a hell of an improvement.

The concept of a “pure UEFI” gaming environment might sound great - direct access to hardware, what could be more efficient? - but the unfortunate reality is that direct access to hardware is a real pain in the arse. Every game would need a complete copy of everyone’s graphics drivers, everyone’s sound drivers, everyone’s network stack, .,. . Computers are much more complicated than they used to be (although in some ways, simpler too) - very few games would work at all. You might get Terraria in 640x480 in 16 colours and no hardware-accelerated drawing, and maybe some sound effects if you’d a very common integrated sound chip on your motherboard.

The operating system is both a gateway and a gatekeeper to hardware; makes a lot of stuff appear to work the same, regardless of what it is really, and the ones that haven’t been enshittified are really quite efficient, do their thing and get out of the way. Even the consoles have an OS for hardware access now, although they’re lightweight. I think it would be a very backward step to be rid of them.

Maybe with an autoexec.bat and a config.sys as plain-text files in the game distribution, so that you can still set up your network configuration, CD drive and sound card?

Joining up your pentagram clockwise? And that one’s not really large enough to stand in the centre of, not you’ve inscribed your blasphemous sacrament in Enochian anyway. Summoning circle for small children, maybe, not someone in their 30s. Amateurs.

Where’s “surprise power over Ethernet” when you need it? Need to blow up the laptop of any cheeky fucker that unplugs one of my remote wifi repeaters to connect their own stuff up…

Your classic VGA setup will probably be connected to a CRT monitor, which among other things has zero lag, and therefore running your sound separately to your audio setup, which also has zero lag, will be fine. Audio and video are in sync.

HDMI cables will almost certainly be connected to a flatscreen of some kind. Monitors tend to have fairly low lag, but flatscreen TVs can be crazy. Some of them have “game” mode (or similar) but as for the rest, they might have half-a-second or more of image processing before actually displaying anything. Running sound separately will have a noticeable disconnect between audio and video; drives me crazy although some people don’t notice it. You would connect your audio setup to the TV rather than directly to source to correct this.

Now, the fact that a lot of cheap TVs only have a 3.5mm headphone jack to “send on the sound” is annoying to me, too. A lot of people just don’t care about how things sound and therefore it’s not a commercial priority. Optical digital audio output would be ideal, in that cheap audio circuitry inside the television won’t degrade the sound being passed over HDMI and you can use your own choice of DAC, but they can be both expensive and add a bit of lag as well.

As soon as the ball at the end rotates, you’ll get fresh ink again - the amount that dries at the very tip is miniscule. This change dries up the slight detritus that builds up around the tip, too - we used to wipe that off onto your other hand if it was the first bit of writing you were doing that day. But damn, that was a few years ago.