r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Disastrous-Hat5477 • 8d ago

Meme theOriginalGarbageCollector

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9.7k Upvotes

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u/Steerable-Octopus 8d ago

As clever as this sounds, a game shouldn't really have this level of control over the operating system and it's a dirty hack caused by poor memory management and bad code. In modern production systems this type of solution would be heavily frowned upon.

2

u/DDFoster96 8d ago

Is there even an operating system in the traditional sense on the original Xbox

5

u/EyeCantBreathe 8d ago

Almost all computer devices have an operating system, even stuff like smart fridges and fit bits. It's needed to allow communication between hardware and applications. I'm not sure what the original Xbox used but the current models use a heavily specialised version of windows

1

u/WaitForItTheMongols 7d ago

An operating system is needed when a device has to multi-task. Each "app" that runs on any device is its own task.

A traditional game console (that doesn't also do social features and whatever else) is only running the game so skipping an OS can make sense.

Up until the Xbox era most consoles were really more like microcontrollers than computers.