Title: 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;O, connect to the net and all that kind of stuff.<p>And when you quit the game it&#x27;s just like normal OpenBSD so you can program it and make games yourself, browse the web and do all sort of stuff.<p>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.
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