Wine is at least a valid way to get sweet sweet video games for Linux like KOTOR, Half-Life 2, IL-2 Sturmovik and Call of Duty (examples from my low-end Intel graphics 4000 laptop).
(HL2 has run natively on Linux for many years just FYI.)
Imagine being able to play these games on ARM without emulation? This is also one of my goals, but as stated in the article, the effort to port them without source code is substantial.
Isn't it possible to do a static translation of the machine code to ARM, and run native?
Quite possible. In the article I mention that a Lithuanian hacker by the name of notaz statically recompiled StarCraft, Diablo 1 & 2. But it's a huge effort, of course. Even better would be to (partially) decompile to, say, C for better performance.
It should be possible to automate translation of the machine code? I've disassembled pure binary with a tool before. How much more work to re-emit ARM? Especially with modern executable formats including debug info, identification of code and data segments etc. which was problematic with pure binary
I'm not an expert on the topic, but the way from a x86/x64 disassembly to an ARM binary is very long. The identification of segments is not 100% accurate, manual corrections will be required, addresses have to updated etc. I'd say fully automatic translation is not really feasible, but I expect to be contradicted :)
I mean, this is "valid" if this is the software the author wants to run, I'm just surprised anyone would go to this kind of trouble to run Notepad++, which is something like my fifth-favorite text editor.
It was very frustrating at times, I cannot lie... It's my favorite editor though, so I just HAD to do it. Now I have to compile all of the plugins I use.