Oddly enough, this used to be a feature—in the system architectures of 30-40 years ago.<p>A lot of consoles had no concept of the CPU being the final arbiter of the system being running or halted—things like the PPU and SPU and so forth would just continue to merrily loop on even if the CPU halted, or was executing a CPU-reboot instruction.<p>You can see this in many NES and SNES games, where the game will &quot;soft-lock&quot;: the CPU crashes, but the music (being a program running on the SPU) keeps playing, and the animations on the screen (being programs running on a PPU, or dedicated mappers feeding it) keep animating.<p>But this isolation can also be used deliberately, especially where the framebuffer is concerned. Since systems up until the 1990s-or-so had extremely small address-spaces (&quot;8-bit&quot; and &quot;16-bit&quot; are scary terms when you&#x27;re trying to write a complex program), and since console games were effectively monolithic unikernels (even the ones &quot;running on&quot; OSes like DOS: DOS would basically kexec() the game), frequently a game&#x27;s ROM or size-on-disk would exceed the capacity of the address space to represent it.<p>The solution to this was frequently to actually have several switchable ROM banks or several on-disk binaries, and to effectively <i>transparently restart the system to switch between them</i>. This isn&#x27;t equivalent to anything as &quot;soft&quot; as kexec(); you <i>wanted</i> the CPU&#x27;s state reset and main memory cleared, so your newly-loaded module could immediately begin to use it. Any state you wanted to preserve between these restarts would be stored on disk, or in battery-backed-RAM on a cartridge.<p>This is how C64 games managed to fit a rich-looking splash screen into their game: the splash screen was one program, and the game was another, and the splash screen would <i>stay on the framebuffer</i> while the C64 was rebooting into the game.<p>This is also the architecture of games like Final Fantasy 6 and 7: when the credits list developers&#x27; roles as something like &quot;menu program&quot;, &quot;battle program&quot;, or &quot;overworld program&quot;, those aren&#x27;t mistranslations of &quot;programming&quot;—those were literally <i>separate programs</i> that the console rebooted between, hopefully finishing in the time it took for the console to finish executing a fade-out on the PPU. When a battle starts in a Final Fantasy game, the CPU has been reset and main memory has been entirely cleared; everything the game knows about to run the battle is coming from SRAM. (And the reason the Chrono Trigger PSX port feels so laggy is that CT has this architecture too, but reading a binary from a CD takes a lot longer than switching a ROM bank. Games <i>designed</i> in the PSX era took that into consideration, but ports generally didn&#x27;t.)<p>I&#x27;ve always thought it&#x27;d be cool to re-introduce this idea to game development, through a kind of abstract machine in the same sense as Löve or Haxe. You&#x27;d have a thin &quot;graphical terminal emulator&quot; that would contain PPU and SPU units and the SRAM, and would be controlled through an exposed pipe&#x2F;socket (sort of like a richer kind of X server); and then you&#x27;d write a series of small programs that interact with that socket, none of them keeping any persistent state (only what they can read out of the viewer&#x27;s SRAM), all of them passing control using exec().<p>(There&#x27;s another thing you&#x27;d get from that, too: the ability to write strictly-single-threaded, &quot;blocking&quot; programs that nevertheless seemed not to block anything important like frame-rendering or music playing. You know how &quot;Pause&quot; screens worked in most games? They just threw up an overlay onto the PPU and then stuck the CPU into a busy-wait loop looking for an &#x27;unpause&#x27; input. The game&#x27;s <i>logic</i> wouldn&#x27;t continue, but the game would still &quot;be there&quot;, which was just perfect. This also allowed for &quot;synchronous&quot; animations—like Kirby&#x27;s transformations in Kirby Super Star, or summoning spells in the FF games, or finishers in fighting games—to just run as a bit of blocking code on top of whatever was currently on the screen, without worrying that something would change state out from under them.)