Quick Question About Programs

[Namo]

I already know that WINE will be pretty much impossible to run on the Pandora, but does that totally count out windows programs completely from ever running on Pandora? For example, if I wanted to play something like Spelunky, a Windows only game, would there be some way to get it to work on the Pandora?

EDIT: Sorry, posted in the wrong area. Can a moddy please move it to the appropriate section?

 

[cosurgi]

ED posted a movie with win 3.11 working in emulator.

 

[VRAndy]

I already know that WINE will be pretty much impossible to run on the Pandora, but does that totally count out windows programs completely from ever running on Pandora? For example, if I wanted to play something like Spelunky, a Windows only game, would there be some way to get it to work on the Pandora?

EDIT: Sorry, posted in the wrong area. Can a moddy please move it to the appropriate section?

For a closed source piece of software your only hope is to convince the developer to port it for you.

Unlikely, but not impossible.

 

[Yoyobuae]

http://nintendo.joystiq.com/2009/05/26/guy-runs-windows-95-on-wii-wonders-why/

Self-explanatory.

 

[lulzfish]

If that game requires more power than a DOS-era game, then yes.
The Pandora will be straining to translate from x86 + Windows to ARM + Linux, and there will be VERY little power available, and some of the APIs might not be implemented perfectly.

 

[SirisC]

You have a couple of options.

1. Wait for YoYo Games to port Game Maker to Linux and hope the port includes support for ARM and Open-GL ES.

2. Use the provided source code for Spelunky to rewrite on a different engine that runs on Pandora.

So, probably not anytime soon.

 

[Exophase]

I doubt very many games that require Windows 95+ will work fast enough on any console running DOSBox or Bochs, unless it's an input-driven game like Minesweeper.

(fyi - although Bochs was historically known as being slow as piss, it should be much faster since Darek Mihocka of emulators.com has been optimizing it, and it's probably a much better choice over DOSBox when there's no recompiler support.. possibly even when there is, for platforms where the recompiler isn't that good, like ARM)

 

[JayFoxRox]

Since most games use a fixed set of functions there is a high chance that you can actually use usermode emulation (using qemu for example) using a custom wrapper (possibly using parts of the wine source).
Personally I will probably try to wrap some of the direct3d samples just as a challenge myself during the summer break.


//Edit: But I wouldn't expect anything to run at a good speed unless recompiled - not even these samples

 

[paulguy]

Something to note: a lot of .NET stuff should run alright, as long as it doesn't use P/Invoke. Even if it's a .exe, you can just do mono Whatever.exe and it'll just run through mono.

 

[Namo]

I doubt very many games that require Windows 95+ will work fast enough on any console running DOSBox or Bochs, unless it's an input-driven game like Minesweeper.

So, your saying that a game that requires input to move, such as Castle of the Winds for example, would hypothetically work?

(Castle of the Winds is a roguelike for windows 3.1, and nothing moved until you did.)

 

[Pleng]

Ye Castle of The winds will most probably work.

 

[Namo]

Alright, thanks for the replies. If anything, once I actually get a Pandora, I can see for myself.

 

[WizardStan]

you can kind of see right now. Get DosBox, follow the steps outlined to get Win95 running on it, set the cycles to 4000 or so, and see how well it works.
Is 4000 the number of cycles? Or was it 6000 we saw? I forget. Doesn't matter, it'll change. Somewhere between 4000 and 6000 will probably give a good example of how well it works.

 

[fearofshorts]

Wizardstan, he wants to play a windows 3.1 game- a turn-based (like most of them) rougelike.
I think that it might be playable.

 

[WizardStan]

Wizardstan, he wants to play a windows 3.1 game- a turn-based (like most of them) rougelike.
I think that it might be playable.

Might be, that's why I suggested testing it.
Except I thought it was win95, not 3.1. Sorry. That makes it even easier to test!
The answer to "will this DOS/Windows game run under DosBox on the Pandora?" should always be "get a copy of DosBox and test it, it's easy and at the very least you'll already have the environment setup that you can just copy directly onto your Pandora."

 

[Wootson]

I would certainly not hope for Windows 95 games (and higher) to be playable on the Pandora. That will most surely turn out to be a disappointment.

However, there are possibilities like ScummVM, DOSBox and others. But native Windows games are either a very long time away, or not possible at all in the end.

 

[paulguy]

Probably should use normal core, too. Not sure if dynamic works (well) on the pandora.

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

About spelunky. Isn't there game maker source code available for that? Game maker isn't available on linux or ARM, but there wouldn't be a way to use that source to build the game natively on the panda?

 

[Prometheus]

I'm pretty sure that that's not how Game Maker works... I could be wrong, though - I don't have any reason to keep up with Windows-only software, so I might have missed something.

 

[lulzfish]

I think with a lot of effort, someone could port the Game Maker source code to a reasonable language and make it run on the Pandora, but it wouldn't be easy, and probably not legal.