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I've never thought to try this. Now I have to try this.
You're welcome to join! Installation requires the 32 bit Wine runtime, which will require pulling in your distro's 32 bit libs. After that set export WINEARCH="win32" in your env, just run setup and all is golden. It is worth noting that Office 97 + all deps required for 32 bit Wine is still a smaller installation size than any recent Office.
- The 64-bit Windows-on-Windows (WoW64) architecture is implemented, and supports running a 32-bit Windows application inside a 64-bit Unix host process, using thunks to map 32-bit NT system calls to the 64-bit NTDLL.
- WoW64 thunks are implemented for most Unix libraries, enabling a 32-bit PE module to call a 64-bit Unix library. Once the remaining modules are converted to PE, this will make it possible to run 32-bit applications without installing 32-bit Unix libraries.