Skeletor

Basically, I am tired of windows and am thinking of switching over to Ubuntu for my main operating system. The only thing stopping me is that I am an avid gamer, and I don't want to mess with the Linux emulation programs. Basically my plan is to dual boot, but instead of having to boot fully into Windows everytime I want to game, I want to boot to a menu that has a list of all my games and I select one and it then runs that game, basically bypassing the full process.

I thought I had seen this before on a media pc, but I cannot find it again. If anyone knows of such a program to allow me to boot just far enough to select a game to play instead of the full Windows GUI it'd be much appreciated. Maybe even a skin? By the way, I have four gigs of RAM so I use 64 bit xp. Meaning it will need to be x64 compatible.

If no one knows of a program mentioned above, do you guys know of any x64 capable skinning programs? I always used litestep and the stardock suite on x86, and have yet to find a reliable program that works for x64.


Thanks,
Skeletor

nytevizion

LOL, yeah the menu is called Windows.

Regardless of what you do, you need to load the OS that runs whatever particular software you want to run. In your case games.

I'm sure there is a way to do what you are talking about, but in reality it's going to load windows the way it always does, and automatically load up whatever game you want to play, therefor taking the same amount of time it always does.

I wish games of today were like the old days. They were their own operating system back in the day.

jdub01984

You could create a simple launcher menu (there are probably some available online) and set that program to be the shell of your windows os in place of explorer.exe. There is a registry key that you can change the value of and it will load the program you specify in place of the desktop, wallpaper, etc.

This isn't really circumventing windows, as it still loads up, you are just skipping the shell, which would probably speed up the process drastically.

Let me know if you are interested and I will find the registry key to change the shell for you.

Hope that helps. That is about the only possible way I can see of implementing something like you want.

Here is a discussion on another site where people are doing exactly what I had described. I have tried loading the menu tool the poster created so I can not specify how well it works but it seems to work ok, from the other posters.http://icrontic.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15642