Quote:
Originally Posted by Steam Ranger
What are the advantages of a game or application booting directly, as compared to being run from Workbench?
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You're asking the wrong question (mostly). (But let me answer in the spirit I think it was meant.)
Those two methods are (usually) not the same thing. One uses the OS for its functions, the other is an OS in and of itself (albeit minimal).
(Yes, there are exceptions; you can be booting and trackloading fully using the OS, but you're still not letting the OS complete its bring-up and there is no interface for triggering a start of a bootblock-loader floppy from a fully booted OS (well, I bet there exists some tool that will try and do just that, but there is no official one)).
They're different animals, and the decision of what you can do with them is not up to you, that was made by the developer when the game was made. If you want to see an extreme example of this, you can look at Dragon's Lair which actually replaces the Kickstart if you have an A1000 (AFAIK you can skip that if you want to and have extra memory).
The advantage of the bootblock-loader is to treat the Amiga mostly like a games console: You know exactly how much memory you have and you do not have to give up any of that to the OS. The OS can take up arbitrarily much memory and it can be hard to know how much memory you can expect to be free so you might have to be a bit conservative in your estimates or up your memory requirements when working with the OS. You can also use your own custom disk format that can be faster/easier/more available space than the official OFS.
The advantage of an OS based game is that you get fixes and patches in place before being started, which can boost performance majorly for those with more than a minimal spec.
Addendum:
Strictly speaking, if a developer wanted to go the extra mile (it would be interesting to know if any did), you can have a floppy with a fully valid filesystem, having an executable program on that you can start from the OS, that would then take over the OS and then load the bootblock-loader(or replicate its functionality) and start from there as if you booted from it - basically what I described as the tool that might exist.
If this sounds familiar to you, then that is in large parts what WHDLoad does...