Alastar Gabriel (but you can call me anything). I'm an ex-professional software developer, now I make weird art and music :p I will give you bug facts unprompted


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lifning
@lifning

https://box86.org is literal actual real life magic

with it, you can run a great deal of x86 and x86_64 Linux games on ARM (and RISC-V, and POWER...) without even needing any x86 libraries anywhere because it thunks so many things to their native counterparts - SDL, GStreamer, GTK, ALSA, Vorbis, etc. etc. - which combined with the JIT for the game's own code also means it ends up being almost as fast as a native ARM port. (if you do have x86 libs for the stuff it doesn't have native wrappers for, you can of course run even more stuff. and it works with wine!)

imagine my surprise trying to run Anodyne 2 (a unity game) on my ARM desktop intending to see what x86 libraries I'd need to get it working, only for it to just kinda... start running just fine?? like i skipped the entire "wait, doesn't this thing have dependencies" step on purpose and box64 was like "nah don't worry i got you"

and like yeah, at some point someone's gonna have an insufferable "well what about Windows-on-Windows and Rosetta" take upon seeing this and i need to make clear that those are by the OS vendors themselves -- they control the horizontal and the vertical, they can define an ABI like ARM64EC, implement the system calls and entire underlying platform to make sure behavior is consistent, etc.. this is not that. box86 is a scrappy little userspace program created to run some older x86 games on the OpenPandora handheld and it spiraled way out of control from there. it didn't define any new ABIs, it's chasing moving targets, it's basically an entire supercharged ld-linux.so not affiliated with glibc or Linux or anything like that.


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