box86

> But probably not AAA gaming, since gaming on Linux is a tough proposition even in the best of circumstances. Just in case that's unknown to you or to other readers: It's really not true. Have a look at https://www.protondb.com/ - Linux is excellent for gaming, even AAA gaming. The PI processor just would be too weak either way, and not being x86 would prevent the games from running directly. Maybe that incompatibility and not having proprietary games compiled for ARM available is what you meant? That would need something like https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86, which actually seems to work way better than expected.

Huh? You totally can -- it's even mentioned down in the README in the github repo: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86#notes-about-steam You can download a straight tar.gz file from Steam [0], extract it, and run the contained steam executable with box86, and as long as you have the ARM versions of some native libraries installed as mentioned in the project readme, x86 Linux steam will run fine, no wine required. Fun fact, box86 also works on PowerPC, I got it running at the start of the year. Not sure how much has bitrotted, but if you've got a POWER8/9/10 machine, it can run box86 ;) (without JIT, so dramatically slower than in the article, but better than qemu usermode!) [0] http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/pool/steam/s/steam/

It's right in the README - "Box86's Dynarec uses a mechanism with Memory Protection and a SegFault signal handler to handle JIT code." Essentially, code areas are write protected and when they trigger a write fault, the area is marked as "dirty" to be recompiled. https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86/commit/2aa2e53fef61d00df535... first "protect memory, fault handler purges that code block as 'invalid' approach" and https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86/commit/4778760622df90c97da2... second, "mark block as dirty rather than purging it" approach

Could box86 help here? https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86

I came across box86 yesterday during FOSDEM. It have not yet tried it, but is similar and actively maintained: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86

> if you wanted performance you'd probably be better off starting from scratch with an emulator design that cared about performance and which was really clear about its use-cases See box86: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86

> Wine doesn't work on ARM. You'll be delighted to hear that that's not entirely true - there is a Linux x86-on-ARM emulator Box86 [1] that allows you to run Wine apps [2]. While your expectations should be realistic, it's made to defer as much as possible to platform native implementations so there's a bunch of things you can run! [1]: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86 [2]: e.g. here's Warcraft 3 on a Raspberry Pi 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85bfzDSWHNQ

Also check out Box86: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86 Impressive to see people playing Half-Life 2, Unreal Tournament 99 and 2004 on a Raspberry Pi 4. Curious if this could be extended to Emscripten (JIT for WebAssembly/Emscripten?) which would be perfect for archiving and portability. Closest project I have seen is DOSBox-X which seems to already have an Emscripten port: https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x HL2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq5dJ0oc_6k UT2004: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VOAeOQcrdo