Winlator is an Android application that lets you to run Windows (x86_64) apps | Hacker News Reader

Winlator is an Android application that lets you to run Windows (x86_64) apps

github.com

81 pointsdonutloop24 comments

Open articleView on HN

Since there are also Android emulators for Windows, I wonder how deep you can go.

You'll probably run out of RAM before the second recursion.

You can have 64-128GB RAM on a laptop these days. You could push to 3-4 easy.

Are there any android emulators for ios?

Cant wait to play Heroes III, Caesar III, Anno 1602 and Master of Orion II

H3 already has https://vcmi.eu/ as an option for Android.

The AI is so bad that it cannot be considered a game yet. Unless you only do creeping.

The focus seems to be on games, but I wonder how well e.g. Microsoft Office or Adobe apps run.

Calm down Doofensmirtz, you forgot to add 2000 at the end of your project name.

On a serious note, with keyboard and mouse support, this will be a great way to play those old windows LAN games on a tablet. Hope this supports networking.

Tried it once. I wanted to run Zotero windows app as it's superior to android counterpart. Didn't run on my tablet :(

All I see on YouTube is videos of people playing games. What's the status on running, say, a Windows desktop browser?

How to make windows defender leave it alone?

Now I just need SimCity 2000 SE (Win95, not DOS), for my current to be as complete as my Windows Mobile 2003 Samsung SCH-i730 was to me. :^3

But can it run Crysis?

Yep! https://youtu.be/PgU0ugLzpgQ

Actually impressive

Windows apps don't even run probably on windows. Tough to make them work on an Android device.

That's an odd thing to say about the platform with the longest running binary backwards compatibility by far. Software from upwards of 25 years ago still works for the most part, the ABIs are so stable that the easiest way to ship games on Linux that won't break every 6 months is to... use the Windows ABIs as a stable abstraction.

Hear hear

Didn't they remove (or plan to remove soon) Win32 compatibility? Asking because as much as I find Windows a terrible platform from a user point of view, developing simple apps using older Delphi versions is actually a very refreshing experience, and they run perfectly under Linux+WINE, but I'm not sure how good they would run on modern Windows versions.

There have been no announced plans to remove win32 nor would I expect one. Too many apps still in use are win32. Win16 support was only discontinued after basically zero actively developed apps were still using it.

You might be thinking of the fact that current versions of Windows itself require x64 processors to run.

Old games have trouble running on Windows, not sure if the fault is with Windows changes, driver architecture changes, directx changes, games might have been broken but working by accident. As an example you can google the game "The Sims 2" and keywords related with windows10 windows 11. But for sure simple applications and simple games should work still on win11 or wine in linux.

Backwards compatibility != Great user experience.

https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com