Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: jr2 on April 11, 2016, 07:57:49 am
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Considering some programs have compatibility issues. Like some retail Freespace installers (16-bit installer won't run on x64 OSes, even though the game itself is 32-bit).
Example: http://askubuntu.com/questions/308671/run-win-16-bit-application-in-wine (user getting Castle of the Winds to run on WINE).
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No. At least not in the beginning. AFAICT, the Linux subsystem doesn't expose any rendering functionality; you can't get an X server to run on it, let alone something as complex as WINE.
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Darn. Well, hopefully that changes. :nod:
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There used to be a project to cut out the middleman and implement Wine directly on Windows for exactly this purpose, but it's thoroughly dead by now.
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Well, there's always HyperV. Windows 10 has the ability to create a VM with your Windows OS of choice.
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Sure, but that's a lot of overhead just to run an installer. Although in this case people probably shouldn't be trying to run installers from 1999 at all except to extract the files.
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I tried Wine on Windows at one point (the project referred to earlier) but could never get it to work. The 16-bit programs are easy to deal with though. I use XP in VMWare for the 16-bit installers, and Win 3.1 in Dosbox for the really early 16-bit programs. The 32-bit DX5-DX7 games are a bigger issue in terms of compatibility. VMWare is probably the best platform for them and its 3D support is much better than the other options out there, but still not very good.
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I was one of the people trying to get Wine on Windows to work. I could never get it to compile, and the person running the wiki i was following and talking to never did either. Did someone actually get that going at some point?
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There is a compiled version floating around, but I didn't find any use for it in terms of getting broken games working.
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Well, I simply have VirtualBox installed with a Windows XP x32 virtual machine.
Setting it up takes about 20 minutes. Much less than setting up this windows->linux->windows beast.
And it's much more stable than any WINE for windows solution. ;)
Works a treat for all x16 software and the only overhead you got is 4GB of disk space and 500MB of RAM as well as 5% kernel time.
(also, virtualBox is able to pass through 3D rendering instructions on a windows only environment.)
It boots in 15 seconds.
To compare this:
FreespaceSCP gulps up 30GB on my drive and whenever I open my browser it already uses more than 1GB of RAM.
The overhead is tiny for our modern 4GHZ CPUs. The OS does not mind, your system does not mind and the 16bit application certainly gets enough power.
Just use it for all your 16 bit needs and it'll soon pay off. :)