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spidermonkey23
popcar2
Winlator will still be the best option in the near future but the community has been really wanting alternatives since Winlator isn't fully open source. The lead dev develops outside of the repo and appears every few months with an update, but never released the source code for the newest version (8.0)
Now the community is split into multiple forks of version 7.1 in order to add new features & fixes, like Winlator Frost and coffincolors' fork. It's hampering progress and makes the scene very confusing to navigate, so we're rooting for a neater alternative, whether that's MiceWine or whatever else is coming up.
dizhn
Mobox is actually probably still more performant than winlator but it's a pain to set it up. Winlator did make a huge jump in performance lately as well. Maybe the difference is not that much anymore.
rkagerer
This is great! There are so many fantastic Windows games from the pre-smartphone era, before ads, in-app purchases, etc. came along and ruined things.
BTW if you liked X-Com: UFO Defense and want a blast from the past, try out The X-Com Files[1]. It runs on the Android build of OpenXcom[2], and it's not terribly difficult to set it up to sync Savegames between Android and your desktop.
andai
How does this work? Does it run the x86_64 version of Wine in Box64? My understanding of wine was that it just translates API calls, shouldn't it work on any ISA then? (Or is most of a program / game math and that stuff would fail?)
jeroenhd
Box64 does the x64 to ARM translation (while keeping performance as high as possible by calling native ARM library code wherever possible). Throw Wine in there to implement the Windows APIs and you can run amd64 PE binaries on aarch64 with decent performance.
You can't run amd64 without something like Box64 because Wine is not an emulator, so it doesn't interpret or rewrite the instructions to aarch64.
You can use Box64 on other ISAs if you implement the necessary translation code. I believe this is what's being done to run games on RISC-V, but I'm not 100% sure. Good ol' qemu-static would also do the job if Box64 isn't compatible (yet), but that's running the entire application in a foreign architecture so the overhead would be a lot more significant.
Vogtinator
Can wine do ARM64X resp. ARM64EC to mix native aarch64 code with emulated x86(-64) code in the same process for better efficiency?
jeroenhd
Wine doesn't do any of that as far as I know. It loads a Windows PE file, it's (placeholder) DLL dependencies, and starts executing at the main entrypoint. Box64 does translation and has some specific placeholder DLLs that intercept API calls and call native code rather than emulating the entire process.
If what you describe is being done, it's being done by Box64. I don't know enough about aarch64 to know what ARM64X and ARM64EC do, though. I can find [a Github comment](https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/pull/858#issuecomment-16057...) where one of the authors states that the goal is to implement ARM64EC, but I wouldn't know what the status is on that.
jchw
Wine does support ARM64EC and I'm pretty sure you can actually use an x86 emulator with it too (at the very least Hangover should support this, minimizing the amount of emulated code needed.)
offmycloud
It would be great if this was on F-Droid.
fermuch
How is this different to winlator? It seems to depend on termux
dizhn
Which winlator ? :) People are rightly very suspicious of windows emulators coming out every day. Wonder why we haven't seen this in emulator forums.
powerhugs
sunaookami
Not sure why this comment was dead? Vouched for it, it's the official website of Winlator. Repo: https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator
shams93
This is especially sweet for owners of high end android tablets, where if you have an android 16 tablet you can then run both windowws legacy apps and full linux desktop on the same device.
qup
How good is the desktop experience?
hypercube33
Probably depends on the tablet. If it's like Samsung Dex I'd say it's on par or better than ChromeOS with gives and takes.
The app experience reminds me of early Android tablet days where some apps just don't know what to do with a different orientation or window size that isn't constrained by the screen.
If you have apps that work well on phone and tablet or web based apps you're probably golden.
moonlion_eth
It's asking for rootfs file when I run it and just showing a folder list. how do i select the proper file?
blacksmith_tb
Odd choice of name, to my ear at least, given that Android devices rarely have mice...
wongarsu
Bluetooth mice work great with Android, despite not being a popular accessory for phones
In German there is "Mäusewein" which translates to mice wine. It's when you have bad microbes while fermenting wine and the product tastes a bit like mouse urine.
Not sure if that had anything to do with the origin of the emulator's name though.
hypercube33
I use my S21u on a Lenovo docking station (USB C) quite often. Typing drives me nuts on a phone so some of my android only apps are just more pleasant docked / desktop mode.
cess11
So, there's actually a chance I could play Populous: The Beginning on a tablet?
mdaniel
Dear GitHub: please consider providing a nudge for the owner to include a license when creating a public repo. Otherwise the fork button becomes kind of weird, right?
sunaookami
>Otherwise the fork button becomes kind of weird
Then the GitHub ToS applies: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
>By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and "fork" your repositories
do_not_redeem
1. Off topic
2. GitHub already does this. https://i.imgur.com/yAfwWGs.png
pmontra
Probably the default should not be None. There should be a mandatory license, either the Unlicense https://unlicense.org/ or something even simpler ("this is public domain".)
MoreMoore
To expand on this a bit, in many places a software project without a license means that all rights are reserved by the author and that nobody else has any legal right to use it in any way.
I'm not sure if unlicense/public domain would be a better default though. At the very least, that Github prompt should explicitly state with a warning what it means when you select "None" as the license. I think most people don't realize or know what it means for others who want to look at or use the project.
numpad0
Wasn't it MIT or something permissive long time ago? I felt prevalence of "it's marked as ___ but actually proprietary" might have influenced that
lykahb
How does this work in practice once you run the application? The windows games are designed for a large screen and keyboard&mouse.
wongarsu
You can connect bluetooth keyboard and mouse. They work in just about every Android app. And mant phones support external displays via USB-C
tootie
Depending on the device you can plug an android into a USB hub that will do HDMI out and support devices.
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Interesting, I've not heard of this one before. Most of the emulation community has settled on 'Winlator' as the main android windows emu of choice. Before this it was Exagear, but winlator is easier to get started with. Another route is using proof termux with a DE like xfce and connecting with X but not sure how good this setup is for pure gaming performance, but may be a good option for Dev work.