[Wine] Re: Wine on non-Unix platforms

[DOSGuy]

SpawnHappyJake wrote:
> What about online virtual machines or virtual machines up for download? If your audience isn't ready to switch or even dual boot with Linux, perhaps a downloadable virtual machine with WINE and some games already installed would be a good start.


That's definitely an option I'm considering. I could offer downloads of virtual machines with Wine and one or more games pre-installed, but I might have to offer multiple downloads to cover all of the major emulators/virtualization suites, and it would still require my visitors to be savvy enough to know how to install and use an emulator/virtualization suite, and if they know how to do that, they could just as easily download the game and install it in a virtual machine themselves. What I'm planning for DOS games is to just pack a disk image with each game in a copy of jDosbox, since that will work on any platform that has Java. They just start jDosbox and a batch file starts the game for them. (Exactly that way I already do it on the online (http://www.classicdosgames.com/online.html) page.) It's simple, universal, and requires no technical knowledge on the part of my visitors.

I'm still searching for an equally elegant solution for Windows games. I haven't managed to get any Linux distro to run in DOSBox, which kills the Wine option. (I haven't had any luck getting anything to run in HX DOS Extender under DOSBox, though I haven't completely given up hope on that option.) I could install Linux and Wine in JPC (also a Java emulator), but JPC doesn't support sound, it's slow, and it just isn't very good yet. It looks like JPC development has ended in favor of JPC2, which appears to be a closed, probably commercial project.

I've used Wine in Ubuntu, so I know how awesome it is. That's why I dared to dream that Wine might be portable to a non-POSIX platform, or that Wine code might be used to improve HX DOS Extender. From what I'm reading, it looks like Wine depends on X11 and porting it to SDL didn't turn out so well. I don't begin to understand how Wine works or what would be involved in porting it beyond POSIX, so I really appreciate everyone's answers to my questions.