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by zxspectrum1982 69 days ago
I wonder whether this "recompilation" technology could be used to run Windows software on Linux, as an alternative/complementary technique to Wine.

Back in the day (year 2000, until 10-15 years ago) we had Project Odin to dynamically translate Windows software to run on OS/2: https://github.com/netlabsorg/odin32

1 comments

Windows and Linux run on the same x86 CPU architecture, you don't need to recompile anything. What WINE does is to translate/replace system calls and libraries.
I know how Wine works, thank you. I've used winelib in the past to port Windows software (that I had the source code of) to Linux myself.

My point is the way wine works today is: WinAPI --> winelib --> Linux --> x86

I. e. winelib is reimplementing WineAPI on top of Linux.

What if we could just decompile those Windows functions and recompile them on Linux, or even x86, directly?

The workaround all of these console recompilation projects use is you must have the original game in order to have the binaries (the ones you theoretically decompile and recompile, but actually you take pre-decompiled-recompiled ones by someone else) and assets (graphics, sounds, etc). For Windows applications on Linux, we could do the same: bring your own Windows, then we can decompile and recompile.