Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 2053 from 2003/6/4
Quote:
amigadave schrieb:
Has anyone thought about trying to make something like WINE for MorphOS, so we could run some of the millions of Windows applications and games in some limited way?
We have emulators for many other systems (mostly game consoles) including DOS_Box to run some pre-Windows software, and WINE for Linux has been around for many years, so I would be surprised if no one has thought of creating a port of WINE (which is obviously impossible or it would have already been tried), or created a different emulator that would allow SOME Windows software to be run under MorphOS.
I suppose that the Endianess difference might be a big part of the reason it hasn't been done, but that was solved for DOS_Box so maybe it isn't part of why there is no way to run any Windows software thru an emulator of some kind on MorphOS. I don't want to run any version of Windows, just some of the Windows software that can't otherwise be ported to MorphOS for any reason.
I suppose that it also has not been accomplished because such a translator or emulator might run too slowly on our limited PPC systems. It sure would be great to be able to run just a few of my essential Windows software applications on MorphOS, as I really hate dealing with all the problems Windows continues to have, after all these years, and on hardware that should (but doesn't when running Windows) blow away all of my other Amiga and MorphOS systems.
I realize that this is probably a pointless discussion, but I was a little surprised that I couldn't find any previous threads on this forum site which mentioned this topic.
WINE is an API wrapper not an emulator (hence the name). If WINE were ported you could run programs that use the Windows API, but no x86 binaries as there is no x86 present to run the actual binary. One would need an additional x86 emulator and MorphOS would need to schedule x86 binaries to that x86 processor emulator. Endianess issues are probably not a general show stopper as Windows binaries wouldn't access MorphOS structures directly, but via WINE. But it would probaly add some overhead A port of WINE would be quite some work though. And the required x86 emulator makes it rather slow
So far quite much work for what benefit?
Better approch: emulate a complete pc (like with DOS Box) and run Windows on it. Even better approch: use an actual Windows pc or Linux x86+WINE directly or via a remote desktop session.
For MorphOS x64 WINE would make quite a some sense though (no processor emulation required) IMHO.
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