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Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine

110 points by avaliosdev

by da-x

10 subcomments

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 compat code, protocols, and other paradigms.
I wonder what a hobby OS would have looked like it if it assumed nothing, that is, as a thought experiment, as if aliens on another planet invented computing and started writing OSes from scratch. Imagine we discover software from another planet that would not even work with 8-bit bytes, for instance.

by vinc

1 subcomments

Impressive! 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 absolutely perfect for experimentation!

by pbohun

0 subcomment

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!

by univocal

2 subcomments

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?

by bionsystem

0 subcomment

I remember reading about the minecraft port earlier, very impressive work ; those writeups are a great read too.

by spwa4

4 subcomments

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.

by int0x29

2 subcomments

Honestly 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.