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Boxedwine (Wine on multiple platforms)

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Reply 20 of 184, by danoon

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I'm in the process of releasing a file system with Wine 3.1. It definitely broke a few programs. So far I verified that Age of Empires Demo also won't install under Wine 3 on a real Linux box. But it also fixes some programs. WinTrek no longer has drawing issues. I tried Wine 3.2/3.3, but my programs were 10x slower and I'm not sure why. I guess it will be like Play on Linux, I will have to support multiple Wine versions in order to support more games.

As for Windows 1 and 2 compatibility, that is unfortunate they dropped support in Wine 1.3. Currently with the way I do things, Wine 1.4 is the lowest version I can handle because that is when they implemented their DIB driver. My Winex11.drv replacement doesn't handle palettes, fonts, blending, etc, so Wine will fall back to the DIB driver to handle those cases. Basically Wine just hands me a bitmap and I display it.

http://www.boxedwine.org/

Reply 21 of 184, by Jo22

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danoon wrote:

As for Windows 1 and 2 compatibility, that is unfortunate they dropped support in Wine 1.3. Currently with the way I do things, Wine 1.4 is the lowest version I can handle because that is when they implemented their DIB driver. My Winex11.drv replacement doesn't handle palettes, fonts, blending, etc, so Wine will fall back to the DIB driver to handle those cases. Basically Wine just hands me a bitmap and I display it.

Never mind, it's okay for me. While I really wished WINE would have had kept that,
I also see the improvements that took place with Windows 3.x support.
The games on your gallery look very well now. Some even better than they did on Win95.

And on the bright side, developers of games like Klotz were already prepared for
the upcoming Windows 3.0, so that they made sure they could run fine there.

For the older games, there's still hope that they can be patched enough to appear
as regular (more or less) Windows 3.0 applications (either by Borland's resource editor or Mark30),
but without breaking Windows 2.xx compatibility.

So nothing is really lost (though it would have been cool to be able
to run an unaltered file from ~1986).

Anyway, Boxedwine really improved and I hope it will continue to do so.
If you need any help, you can count on me. 😀

Just write it down or sent me a PM,
and I will try my best to test a few games for you.

Best regards,
happy easter holidays,
Jo22

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 22 of 184, by danoon

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Jo22, thanks for the help. I will definitely post here again when I get closer to another release. I have a major code refactoring going on right now that will hopefully make it easier to add new cpu cores. And with a bit of luck, maybe make the code easier to work with too. But its really too easy to let a code refactoring get out of control. Its already been several weeks since I have been able to compile 😲

http://www.boxedwine.org/

Reply 23 of 184, by Serious Callers Only

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wouldn't it be better to use github? Seriously, i think it's a major turn off for both the visibility of a new project and ease of contribution (not that i was planning anything).

Reply 24 of 184, by danoon

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SCO, I don't know about Github, but SourceForge has been pretty bad about down time this year and now it can take several minutes for simple commits. I wonder what is up with them, its like they don't even want to host projects anymore.

http://www.boxedwine.org/

Reply 25 of 184, by The_L1985

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Jo22 wrote:
Not really related, but years ago the Linux kernal (v.3.14) had broken 16-bit PM support (got fixed by Linus ?), As far as WINE […]
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I think wine breaking programs (ie: regressions) are unusual

Not really related, but years ago the Linux kernal (v.3.14) had broken 16-bit PM support (got fixed by Linus ?),
As far as WINE compatibility is concerened.. well..

Windows 1.x and 2.x NE executables are nolonger recognized properly since quite a while,
as I mentioned briefly in an older thread years ago.

I know, sounds like nitpicking, haha. 😅

In reality, there aren't that many fans of KLOTZ,
Tetris for Windows, Modem Chess, Taipei or Starbase anymore I suppose. 😉

Considering I only know of Taipei because my husband figured out how to "break" it as a kid, probably. 😀

As someone completely new to DOS (I was into my teens when it was discontinued, but Dad hadn't let us actually use DOS prompts ourselves beyond "run [CD-ROM game]" I have zero idea how to get my Win3.1 copy to install on DOSBox...Boxedwine would not only make that easier, but allow me to easily play old Win9x games as well (I still have some of those).

One step forward, two steps back, three steps sideways.

Reply 27 of 184, by danoon

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filipetolhuizen wrote:

If Nitemare 3D works with it, I'll finally be able to switch to x64.

I tested the Windows 3.1 shareware version from https://www.classicdosgames.com/game/Nitemare … or_Windows.html

Looks like just a single x86 instruction was missing in my emulation. I added it and it seems to work now.

I'm not sure when my next release will be ready with this fix, I'm hopeful before the end of the year, but no promises.

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  • nitemare3d..jpg
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    Fair use/fair dealing exception

http://www.boxedwine.org/

Reply 29 of 184, by Jo22

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I second that. Great work! N3D was one of the first 3D games I've seen on Win3.x. 😀

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 30 of 184, by danoon

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Boxedwine is still coming along. I hope to have an 18R2 release later this year. The goals for this release

* No regression for games that used to work
* Wine 3.1 support (mostly done, copy/paste doesn't work, mouse cursor looks weird sometimes)
* Better performance using a JIT recompiler
* Fix at least a few games

The JIT recompiler is coming along nicely and thought I would share some numbers (of course these number are relative to my development machine i7-6700K)

Quake 2

command line: BoxedWine.exe -nosound -root c:\wine17 -zip c:\wine17\wine17.zip -w /home/username/files/q2 /bin/wine /home/username/files/q2/quake2.exe +timedemo 1 +map demo1.dm2

11.6 fps 18R1 32-bit build
21.2 fps current 32-bit build with JIT

And for fun, I experimented with a binary translator, but it is not stable enough for release, though I do plan to continue working on it.

121.8 fps 18R1 64-bit build with binary translator

http://www.boxedwine.org/

Reply 31 of 184, by Jo22

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Good news, thanks for the update! I'm looking forward to it. 😀

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 32 of 184, by danoon

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Released a beta for 18R2

https://sourceforge.net/projects/boxedwine/fi … 202%20Beta%201/

Major changes from 18R1
* Added support for Wine 3.1 (some games work better, some worse)
* Added a dynamic recompiler, should be about 2x faster than 2018 R1
* No longer uses the -m argument to specify memory, it will be dynamically allocated
* Supports -bpp 8 command line argument for games that need the emulated desktop to start in 8-bit
* Fixed some 8-bit color games, like MDK

http://www.boxedwine.org/

Reply 33 of 184, by danoon

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Updated Boxedwine 18R2 beta 1 to Boxedwine 18R2 beta 1a

* Changed Wine to use gdi as its DirectDrawRenderer

This should allow Direct Draw games to work. This registry change could have been done manually, but since Direct Draw using OpenGL doesn't work at all in Boxedwine, I thought it made more sense to include this registry change in the file systems by default.

http://www.boxedwine.org/

Reply 34 of 184, by Jo22

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Thanks for the update! 😀

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 35 of 184, by danoon

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Created the 18R2 release. The readme is below

Overall this release took me a lot longer than expected, but I guess that is common in software. I ported it from c to c++ which is where most of my time was spent. I added a JIT recompiler for the 32-bit Windows build. This gave a good performance improvement. The interesting part of the JIT is that 90% of it was written in a platform independent way, so hopefully it can be used to bring up a WASM version for the web. Before 18R1 I wrote a proof of concept x64 binary translator, it got to the point where it could run Quake 2. I mentioned the performance numbers previously which is about 5x faster than the JIT. For the next release I hope to get this fully implemented.

README

Boxedwine18R2 comes with Wine 1.7, if you want to try Wine 3.1, you can download fullWine3.1-v6.zip

2018-12-04 Changes from 2018 R1
* Added support for Wine 3.1 (some games work better, some worse)
* Added a dynamic recompiler, should be more than 2x faster than 2018 R1
* No longer uses the -m argument to specify memory, it will be dynamically allocated
* Supports -bpp 8 command line argument for games that need the emulated desktop to start in 8-bit
* Fixed some 8-bit color games, like MDK
* Added Midi support for the Windows build
* Fixed a floating point issue. Games that use the Visual Basic runtime that had an overflow error are fixed by this.

Known Issue
* Copy/Paste works with Wine 1.6, but broke in Wine 1.7 which is now the default version for the Windows build

Performance
* VideoDD first test
18R1 7.7M Pixels per Second
18R2 19.9M Pixels per Second

* Quake 2, quake2.exe +timedemo 1 +map demo1.dm2
18R1 10.0 fps
18R2 24.5 fps

* MDK performance test
18R1 79
18R2 170

http://www.boxedwine.org/

Reply 36 of 184, by Jo22

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Thanks for sharing! I already downloaded fullWine3.1-v6.zip ..
I'll try it out once I've got a bit of free time for testing..

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 37 of 184, by danoon

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Hard to believe how much time has passed since my last release. During this time I have worked on a new 64-bit binary translator. This x64 build is multi threaded, so each emulated thread gets its own host system thread. There are still quite a few bugs left with regards to the x64 bit code as well as some random crashes probably related to threading. But overall it is starting to work well. Most games see a 5x-10x performance improvement.

On my system, the quake 2 time demo went from 11.5 fps to 87 fps

I thought I would share a beta build. If you notice any games that work with the 32-bit build or 64-build but not both let me know.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/boxedwine/fi … 201%20Beta%201/

http://www.boxedwine.org/

Reply 38 of 184, by Agathosdaimon

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hi! sorry for this basic question - but is boxedwine in its current state something i could use to run any win95 games like iM1a2, - how does one use it?

Reply 39 of 184, by DosFreak

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As with most things the best thing to do is to try it. Assuming no malware then the worse that could happen is that it doesn't work.

Update on boxedwine status:
https://boingboing.net/2019/07/23/boxed-wine- … with-cheez.html

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