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Comment by Aaargh20318 | Hacker News Reader

Aaargh20318·

Apparently it’s a emulator like Proton as used by Steam to run Windows games on Linux. It even uses Rosetta to run x86_64 core on ARM. But it’s not intended for end users. Instead it’s intended for developers to evaluate how their game would run on macOS so they can decide wether or not to port it.

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According to CodeWeavers, it is based on their CrossOver code (GPL 2.1) and can be committed back into Wine:

https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2023/6/6/wine-come...

It uses a proprietary framework that implements Direct3D on top of Metal:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36224057

Your link confirmed that it uses wine. And your description sounds exactly like how codeWeavers wine implements direct 3D upon opengl.

I imagine it’s simply a proprietary product based on liberally licensed (LGPL) open source code, much in the same way Safari was built upon KHTML.

Sure it uses Wine, but the Direct3D API is handled by the proprietary D3DMetal framework, which implements Direct3D on top of Metal. This is different than CodeWeaver's CrossOver approach, which uses Wine's DirectX-on-Vulkan implementation and then MoltenVK to run Vulkan on Metal.

So, it is not just Wine. It is Wine plus a large proprietary Apple Framework that has most of the Direct3D magic sauce.

Thanks for the info! I think a couple of us in this thread may be arguing cross purposes - I want to ensure that codeweavers gets credit for their open source contributions and you want to ensure technical accuracy. These are both good goals and don’t conflict with each other.

Yeah, definitely! All of this wouldn't be possible without the Wine project and CodeWeavers.

Wine (and Proton) is not an emulator

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