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Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine

astral-os.org

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Re: Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine

#21

Post by grishka »

da-x wrote: post #8

While 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…

Getting someone else's preexisting code to meaningfully run on a thing you made from scratch is quite rewarding. I haven't made an OS but I did make a Game Boy emulator. It runs most of my childhood games just fine, which made it totally worth it for me.

Re: Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine

#22

Post by Wowfunhappy »

da-x wrote: post #8

While 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…

See, I think this is what makes it cool as heck. Write your own OS from scratch, implement the right interfaces, and bam, all this existing software just works.

I love the idea of Wine acting as the universal interface that lets you run windows apps wherever the heck you want.

And of course, this is just an escape hatch. You can support Wine and also support "native" apps which are optimized for your custom OS.

Re: Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine

#23

Post by order-matters »

thegrim33 wrote: post #17
da-x wrote: post #8

While 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…

For a hobby OS .. nobody is stopping you. I have my own hobby OS where everything is custom, I don't even have a standard C library, I made my own, I don't copy posix conventions, everything is just implemented as to what makes sense to me. I never understood the people that go through all the effort to work on their own OS, and all their work is to just create a linux/windows clone from scratch. Of course even accom…

I get that its a hobby, but are you able to do anything with it? is it purely a learning sandbox or are there some use-cases that you are able to use your OS for that it is a cleaner or more performant solution than existing OS?

Re: Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine

#24

Post by hgoel »

da-x wrote: post #8

While 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…

I've felt that AI has made this issue a lot less painful. I too have dabbled in hobby OSs a lot, but dropped them around getting drivers and the basic userspace setup, because implementing all the legacy interfaces just kills the fun and the alternative is being unable to do anything meaningful with the OS. Porting the GCC stack to your OS is very rewarding initially, but then it's just reading musl/newlib source code and making your syscalls emulate what they expect, which is far less rewarding.

But, since you can delegate a lot of the grunt work to AI now, I think it becomes a lot easier to have it either, write the legacy stuff for you, or port software over. That way you still have the ability to design a system with the things you think would be interesting, while still having some possibility of running "real" software under it.

Re: Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine

#25

Post by MisterTea »

nehal3m wrote: post #16
MisterTea wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean a packaged file that one simply runs? Isn't that the installer?

An installer extracts and moves a bunch of files from a blob to the filesystem, writes registry values (on Windows anyway), sets environment variables, sets up services, permissions and a bunch of other things, does it not? A ROM is a binary blob that some executable accepts as input and interprets, the executable being the emulator, which simulates the target hardware well enough that the ROM's machine code runs as…

I was being facetious captain obvious.

Re: Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine

#28

Post by bri3d »

univocal wrote: post #27

I remember Wine being extremely interwined with XLib not just for the OpenGL rendering backend but also for the windowing and widget/UI rendering interfaces. Is this port running natively without using an X server / emulator?

No? The article extensively discusses the use of XOrg. With that said, the Wine graphics abstractions are a lot better now and there are many working backends (winex11, winemac, winewayland, winehaiku, etc.)

Re: Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine

#29

Post by toast0 »

univocal wrote: post #27

I remember Wine being extremely interwined with XLib not just for the OpenGL rendering backend but also for the windowing and widget/UI rendering interfaces. Is this port running natively without using an X server / emulator?

The screenshot shows an Xterm, I'd assume there's an X server running?

Re: Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine

#30

Post by sudobash1 »

spwa4 wrote: post #2

I wish people would start with a "rom format" for windows games. There's so many old games and no standardized way to run them.

I don't think it is supported anywhere else currently, but Batocera has a simple wsquashfs format. It is basically the game compressed into a squahsfs. Then it can be managed as simply as other traditional ROMs:

https://wiki.batocera.org/systems:windows#folder_compression

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