On my morning commute this morning I was considering the reasons why more commercial developers hadn't taken the Linux plunge and had an idea. Rather then take the brute force approach and porting I'm wondering if the problem could be side stepped through virtualization. For lack of a better term create a Virtual Game Console. The idea being that you create a virtual standard set of hardware in the virtual machine much like a regular game console. The real trick would be creating a virtual GPU abstraction for whatever hardware the host had underneath. There obviously would have to be some minimum requirements for the virtual console to work and probably some sort of certification process for the hardware but I thought what console manufacturer wouldn't like the idea of foregoing the hardware (that's usually sold at a loss).
If you build it they will come?
With such a foundation in place would commercial game developers use it? Probably not. You'd still have to have some middleware and tools. That's where the Sega and Atari's of the world (companies who once sold their own hardware) might be inclined to build out the necessary tools for developers.
Yeah I know what I'm suggesting isn't even running games on linux persay.. It's really just a stepping stone.
Of course someone is probably going to school me on how this has either already been tried or is currently in the works /shrug.
I guess it boils down to true cross platform gaming without having to retool with every change in software or hardware. At least in theory...
I mean come on we need *something* to use the x4, x6, x8 core processors for..
