It's kind of crazy that we have a hobby OS that supports Linux infrastructure so that can support Wine infrastructure to support a Windows application. Very impressive!
Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine
31–38 of 38 posts
Re: Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine
#32Honestly the most interesting thing to me would be how they got GPU drivers working for a hobby OS. I suspect this was difficult. Unfortunately the blog makes no mention of it.
The source, conventions are quite similar to Linux. So, probably some level of POSIX compliance + reusing standard libraries (such as mlibc) helped a lot.
Re: Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine
#33While I like the idea of starting a hobby OS, but the most despairing thing about it that to be useful it would always have to implement 'legacy' interfaces of other OSes. That is, it cannot stand on its own and create a new ecosystem, instead it has to interface to the world and implement TCP, POSIX, know formats widely used files and such. You end up with an OS kernel that talks Linux/Win32 and takes on a lot of co…
Does a hobby OS need to be useful? (If you want to communicate with other computers) You probably do want to speak IP, but if you want to do all the work, you don't need to use BSD sockets. POSIX and other such things will let you use more of other people's software... but that's a choice. You can also do a lot of reuse if you just want to focus on some parts. There's no need to write a bootloader unless you want to.…
>You probably do want to speak IP, but if you want to do all the work, you don't need to use BSD sockets.
You could use STREAMS!
Re: Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine
#34Impressive! I like the goal of making a hobby OS viable as a daily driver. I've been working on my own hobby OS for half a decade. It does a lot less, but it has helped me realize that we can remove much of the complexity of a generic mainstream OS while still meeting our personal computing needs. I know I'm just poorly reinventing something between DOS and Unix/Plan 9 in an extremely limited fashion, but it's absolu…
This, I assume?: https://github.com/vinc/moros Pretty impressive, you've gotten much farther than I ever did (I didn't have the patience to implement all the borderline boilerplate an OS needs).
Yes thanks!
I remember all the things I needed to implement before reaching userspace, it's a lot indeed. After that it gets easier because every new change is motivated by a specific smaller goal like supporting the network card of a new laptop, or adding sounds to the emulator, or adding one more syscall or device file. You get rewarded by new capabilities after each addition.
Re: Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he means where the DOS/config is all set up too. Sort of like a really small VM.
It was a joke, because ISO is a file copy of a CD-ROM disc. ;)
DOS mostly predates CD-ROM.
The DOS heyday was the 1980s.
No officially-released version of DOS contains generic CD-ROM drivers; the last few DOSes (MS-DOS 6.x, DR-DOS 6/7) contain the redirector (`MSCDEX.EXE` or equivalent) but not the device driver.
From 1992, Windows 3.1 rapidly took over.
The first mass-market CD-ROM drives were the mid-1990s, and ATAPI CDs that could attach to an EIDE interface only became common in the latter half of the 1990s, when Windows 95 was the default PC OS.
Microsoft never shipped any version of Windows 3.x on CD; I used to have a Gateway 2000 WfWg3.11 CD in my travelling toolkit, just in case. Windows 95 originally shipped on 13 1.4MB floppies.
Re: Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was a joke, because ISO is a file copy of a CD-ROM disc. ;)
DOS mostly predates CD-ROM. The DOS heyday was the 1980s. No officially-released version of DOS contains generic CD-ROM drivers; the last few DOSes (MS-DOS 6.x, DR-DOS 6/7) contain the redirector (`MSCDEX.EXE` or equivalent) but not the device driver. From 1992, Windows 3.1 rapidly took over. The first mass-market CD-ROM drives were the mid-1990s, and ATAPI CDs that could attach to an EIDE interface only became commo…
The original comment was regarding Windows not specifically DOS, someone else inferred DOS from the comment.
On that note, FreeDOS does support CD-ROM.
Re: Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine
#37While I like the idea of starting a hobby OS, but the most despairing thing about it that to be useful it would always have to implement 'legacy' interfaces of other OSes. That is, it cannot stand on its own and create a new ecosystem, instead it has to interface to the world and implement TCP, POSIX, know formats widely used files and such. You end up with an OS kernel that talks Linux/Win32 and takes on a lot of co…
Rob Pike of Plan 9 and Go fame lamented this back in 2000 in his “Systems Software Research is Irrelevant” talk: http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf I’d love to see a new operating system that explores radically different APIs for applications. The trouble is writing an operating system is a large effort. Barring market effects, OS has to be heads-and-shoulders better than existing ones in order to convince applic…
It's really hard for new designs to thrive outside hobby/research usage.
Linux/BSD have massive hardware support, where a new OS needs to start from scratch. The same is true of software support: a new OS that truly has new primitives either adds a POSIX layer (and all POSIX-like software can't benefit from many of its improvements).
Even once you get past hardware and software support (both herculean tasks) performance needs years of hard work to be comparable to mainstream OSs.
And don't even get me started on the ever-growing complexity in standard protocols: HTTP2/3? QUIC? TLS? All "doable", but also huge sinks for time and effort when you already have a huge list of things to deal with.
Re: Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
DOS mostly predates CD-ROM. The DOS heyday was the 1980s. No officially-released version of DOS contains generic CD-ROM drivers; the last few DOSes (MS-DOS 6.x, DR-DOS 6/7) contain the redirector (`MSCDEX.EXE` or equivalent) but not the device driver. From 1992, Windows 3.1 rapidly took over. The first mass-market CD-ROM drives were the mid-1990s, and ATAPI CDs that could attach to an EIDE interface only became commo…
The original comment was regarding Windows not specifically DOS, someone else inferred DOS from the comment. On that note, FreeDOS does support CD-ROM.
I know. (I've reviewed it and am on its mailing lists; I've contributed a tiny handful of fixes to FreeGEM.)
So does the Win98 emergency boot diskette.
But both post-date Win95.