Progression of technology gives me the warm fuzzies (Gaming)

by slycrel , Saturday, October 19, 2019, 22:29 (1650 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Where it kind of hurts is on the laptop. I can run Catalina on it, but I like playing adventure games on it while relaxing. And many of those are 32 bit. So I guess I’ll eventually just have to sit in the chair and play them on the tower.

Is there a way to make a 64 bit wrapper for 32 bit apps, like the way wine can make an OS X app?

Yeah, I hear you. There are a few things I'll probably never play again outside of a lot of effort to run an old virtual machine.

I'm not sure it's quite as simple as wine. Wine works by re-implementing (not emulating) the libraries that the windows system uses to run. Because linux/mac runs on the same x86 CPUs, wine allows the executable to work by integrating the pre-compiled executable with the re-implemented windows operating system libraries, along with some system environment hand-waving, with the host operating system.

What you're asking is roughly the same as saying "I'd like to run an x86 compiled program on an ARM chip". It's a hardware difference -- the executable is compiled against a specific chipset. As such you'd have to simulate the CPU/hardware layer in addition to the operating system layer like wine does. Which is why I'd recommend an operating system inside of a VM.

And to be clear... anything is possible with software, but it's a lot harder than what wine is doing.

There are other options, like remoting into another machine (aka steambox or VNC) or display-over-a-network tricks on linux on a fast network. But really, getting a re-compiled binary or using a VM is probably your best option for a while.

Since you mentioned it, for the super old adventure games, there are things like scummVM that are possible avenues here too.

Keep an eye on places like good old games who have already embraced wine wrappers for older games. They have financial incentive to figure this out. If something OSS happens here they'll pick it up if they can.

Good luck, and if you find a good solution let us know. =)