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Can you install thid 25 year old program? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 7 months ago by GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world

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[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 31 points 7 months ago

The comment you replied to says the opposite. It's a half-truth, but Linux+WINE does some backwards compatibility better than Windows.

First, Wine doesn't have an arbitrary limitation against running 16-bit executables AFAIK

Second, there is anecdotal evidence of some older games breaking to graphics driver updates on Windows, but running fine (or even faster!) on Linux thanks to a much more straightforward graphical stack (and the fact that DXVK is dark magic). Even something as simple as fullscreen mode support on old games can be a buggy and flickery pain in the ass, whereas on Linux the same binary will work flawlessly with any decent compositor.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

The limitation isn't really arbitrary once you put a processor in in long mode (64 bit) it can't do Virtual 8086 Mode any more. One of those things AMD did when designing 64-bit mode to clean up that particular can of hysterical raisins.

...also, even back in the days processors were fast enough to run that old stuff under DOSEMU. Which you probably want to do anyway as you don't have a Roland MT-32.

Oh, EDIT: I had once fullscreen issues under wine, and that was Witcher 3, not the current upgrade the older one: Alt-tabbing away worked perfectly, but the game didn't properly recognise that it had lost and re-gained focus, refusing to go out of pause. Switching fullscreen mode in-game (fullscreen to borderless or the other way around) fixed that.

Wayland is way better with fullscreen than x11, btw, especially considering that there's still the occasional SDL1 game around, those will right-out switch your video mode and disable alt+tab.

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago

Thanks for the info on V86! Interesting stuff!

I concur on Wayland being particularly great. The only downside is forced V-sync, I don't know if there is a (proposed) protocol extension to do direct framebuffer writes in fullscreen.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 1 points 7 months ago

I'm pretty sure every compositor worth its salt (that is, kde or wlroots-based) reparents on fullscreen. KDE also does variable refresh rate and at that point I'm happy -- I'm not playing competitive shooters any more and VRR is such an upgrade I'm not even noticing frame rates dropping. Back in the days not hitting 60 was terrible, sometimes I had to settle for 30 (though before LCDs you could do rates in between), now I can go "ah, around 40-50 but I like the bling let's keep it at that". Dropped frames are simply magnitudes worse than delayed frames.