this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Coreboot-4.17 (June 2022)

Coreboot developers are releasing Coreboot 4.17 today with various new motherboards supported, support for GRUB2 atop SeaBIOS as a payload, and various low-level code improvements too. Plus Coreboot 4.17 brings the "coreDOOM" payload -- yes, it's possible to get the game Doom running atop this system firmware.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago

Hmm no boot drive found, press F1 to play Doom instead!

Kinda like the Sega Master System. If you turned it on without a game and pressed UP + A + B at the screen telling you to put in a game cartridge, it launches a game where you guide a snail through a maze:

https://youtu.be/Fz4YnEWpK10

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Lets be honest, here. you can play doom on anything. it's more universal than C.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Apparently that includes voting machines.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

lmao coreboot/linux programmers are so ahead of time

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Woah, I did not even know about this. Is there a video of this in action anywhere?

[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago

"sorry, your hard drive is dead. Let's play some asteroids!"

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Let's add it to Systemd. That way we can play games while we wait for systemd to load

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

cant make it more bloated than it already is

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I would much rather have a little diagnostic and data recovery OS in the firmware with drive mounting support, a file manager, and USB mass storage rather than Doom or Tetris or whatever the hell. Playing Doom from firmware is a neat proof of concept, but won't help anybody un-bork their OS install.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

It will distract you for a few minutes and thus reduce stress.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

There were some motherboards that had something of that nature (Asus had ExpressGate IIRC) but they were all hilariously incomplete because they didn't realize how useful as a diagnostic thing it'd end up being and tried to sell it off as a "quick boot" thing.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

That is an awesome idea lmao

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

As a cool side project I could see someone developing it. But I don't think any companies would put money into it. It doesn't add a huge amount of value to the product.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Actually it could detract value.

A consumer's computer's hd get corrupted. They're now playing space invaders. That means they're not buying a new computer.

For some people it works just be a delay, others may just resign themselves to play space invaders for eternity.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)
[–] possiblylinux127 4 points 11 months ago

Be mindful of security

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

You could set up a ROM drive with like 128k, and that would be enough to emulate a floppy, boot DOS, and load an classic off-the-shelf game.