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How Wine works 101

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Re: How Wine works 101

#81

Post by Cloudef »

kgeist wrote: post #70
monocasa wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of games, Red Alert 2 off the top of my head. Never got it running even in compatibility mode and changing the bit depth.

According to Raymond Chen, this usually happens when software relies on undocumented APIs or undefined behavior. When Windows removes undocumented APIs or changes behavior not covered by the documentation, such apps break and people blame Microsoft. For example, I remember one app used to programmatically find some kind of "Print" menu in Windows' desktop environment and call it to implement printing functionality. W…

Most old games do not work because of old graphics apis. Wine emulates these apis on top of modern graphic apis. Windows users usually need to use wrappers, or wined3d from wine.

Re: How Wine works 101

#83

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

monocasa wrote: post #67
Arainach wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[[Citation Needed]]. Other than 16-bit software on 64-bit Windows, do you have an example?

A lot of games, Red Alert 2 off the top of my head. Never got it running even in compatibility mode and changing the bit depth.

>A lot of games, Red Alert 2 off the top of my head. Never got it running even in compatibility mode and changing the bit depth.

Mate, I played Red Alert 2 off the original 1999(?) ISO last month on my Windows 11 installation. I had to copy some missing deprecated Direct Draw DLLs that don't ship with modern Windows anymore and everything worked.

If you would have Googled the issue, you would have found tons of forum and reddit posts explaining how to run it on modern Windows.

You can't expect modern Windows to ship 20+ year old DLLs that allow running Windows 98 APIs as that's a major security vulnerability since older APIs had direct hardware/memory access without any kind of checks and balances. But if you Google a bit, the workarounds for compatibility are available.

Also, a lot of games and apps in those days would basically "hack" Windows and hook into various process and drivers in non standard ways and use various undocumented APIs so it's no wonder they don't work in later versions of windows anymore regardless of the compatibility setting you use.

Re: How Wine works 101

#84

Post by Zardoz84 »

nine_k wrote: post #15
haunter wrote: post #6

What I'm curious about (and probably there are some good write ups about this somewhere) that how come modern Linux and modern Wine is better to run old Windows applications than modern Windows (7 to some extent but mostly 10&11). Did MS "intentionally" "left behind" certain APIs and system calls to sacrifice it for some greater good? Like I use Windows every day and have no problems at all. And I use Linux every day…

The point of Wine is to run older Windows software. Who needs the most modern versions, just pays for MS Windows. Windows, like DOS before it, adapts to run certain apps more efficiently, to sidestep their bugs, or to fulfill their assumptions which generally do not hold. I suppose Wine does a lot of the same. It pays a lot of attention tp running old(er) popular software smoothly. I suppose Wine has more adjustments…

No

Re: How Wine works 101

#85

Post by angch »

nomel wrote: post #72
retrac wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, I don't want to run Windows. But I do want to run some current Windows software -- mostly games and design tools. I don't think I'm a major exception; I wonder if there have been any surveys. Linux users who want to run current Windows software are likely much of the user base. Lately I've been playing a recent DirectX 11 game via Wine. Worked out of the box. I think it might be a bit slower than under Win…

What game is this? I haven’t seen a modern title, or monitor, capped to 60fps in over a decade. I think most mobile games go higher, these days.

Elden Ring, for one.

Re: How Wine works 101

#86

Post by [deleted] »

nomel wrote: post #72
retrac wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, I don't want to run Windows. But I do want to run some current Windows software -- mostly games and design tools. I don't think I'm a major exception; I wonder if there have been any surveys. Linux users who want to run current Windows software are likely much of the user base. Lately I've been playing a recent DirectX 11 game via Wine. Worked out of the box. I think it might be a bit slower than under Win…

What game is this? I haven’t seen a modern title, or monitor, capped to 60fps in over a decade. I think most mobile games go higher, these days.

[deleted]

Re: How Wine works 101

#87

Post by epigramx »

gerdesj wrote: post #17
haunter wrote: post #6

What I'm curious about (and probably there are some good write ups about this somewhere) that how come modern Linux and modern Wine is better to run old Windows applications than modern Windows (7 to some extent but mostly 10&11). Did MS "intentionally" "left behind" certain APIs and system calls to sacrifice it for some greater good? Like I use Windows every day and have no problems at all. And I use Linux every day…

MS are profit motivated (by definition) and Wine is functionality motivated (again by definition). MS are currently hell bent on getting you onto a cloud subscription for Windows as a service (WAAS) because that is their current business model. The Wine project is hell bent on delivering functionality that you want and they think you might want. Wine is less about shuffling the start menu to the middle of the taskbar…

Wine has been affected by profit too. Nobody remembers CodeWeavers? Let alone plenty of distros are for-profit and use it as a means to advertise their game-playing capabilities.

Re: How Wine works 101

#88

Post by ghoomketu »

> Fifth, oh, did you want to run a game? Not just a hello world? Then you need to deal with DirectX, audio (hello PulseAudio, my old friend), input devices (gamepads, joysticks), etc. It’s a lot of work!

These last paragraphs just made me realise how grateful I am to people who work on these open source projects without expecting any compensation or even praise for their work.

It has happened once or twice that I tried running something in Wine and it just wouldn't work which made me a little annoyed.

But reading how complex and difficult it is to make such things happen I am surprised the amount of effort it takes to even make Notepad.exe work!

Re: How Wine works 101

#89

Post by lozenge »

rcoveson wrote: post #80
kgeist wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Raymond Chen, this usually happens when software relies on undocumented APIs or undefined behavior. When Windows removes undocumented APIs or changes behavior not covered by the documentation, such apps break and people blame Microsoft. For example, I remember one app used to programmatically find some kind of "Print" menu in Windows' desktop environment and call it to implement printing functionality. W…

If your plan is to maintain decades of backwards compatibility with software from thousands of third parties, it's going to involve maintaining some originally-undocumented behaviors that people exploited. That's what the wine developers got themselves into willingly, and it's what the Windows devs are increasingly shirking.

It's a question of priorities. Microsoft must have realised these edge cases were slowing development down and how many people really want to run a game or a CD burner software from 1998?

Of course, this could all have been avoided with a proper universally understood spec like POSIX but it's too late for that now. (And POSIX never had graphics or sound support, which shows how big that project would be, with the churn of the PC hardware from 2D to 3D &etc)

The hardware is also starting to protest - no way to run 16 bit instructions in x86_64 mode on a 64 bit processor.

Re: How Wine works 101

#90

Post by wishfish »

tarsinge wrote: post #77
spoonjim wrote: post #34

I thought I was going to get an explanation of why so many guys pay tons of money for fermented grape juice that tastes worse than just regular grape juice.

Paying tons on money is indeed silly, but if you think it tastes worse you have a sugar dependency problem.

To me, grape juice is divine and wine is, at best, tolerable. Some of us are pretty sensitive to the taste of alcohol. Even in small quantities in mild drinks like wine.
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