Per oggi avrei dovuto cacciare la soluzione di emulazione finalizzata per i giochi Windows [esenti da requisiti hardware irrealistici] con v86… ma a quanto pare è un po’ impegnativo, devo implementare almeno un’altra hack per soddisfare i requisti essenziali. Però, nel frattempo Boxedwine è rimasto un pensiero fisso, soprattutto dopo avaver constatato che la versione nativa su Windows e Linux funziona e basta: è praticamente plug-and-play con tutti i giochi che sono risaputi funzionare, al contrario del Wine “essenziale” proveniente da upstream o da una distro qualsiasi. 📦
Touhou 6 su Boxedwine per Windows mi è partito, e con una versione (la 5.0 almeno) gira pure bene, ci ho potuto giocare (anche se le ventole del portatile sono volate nel processo). Non credo che adesso magicamente riuscirò a farlo andare sulla versione web, perché c’è un inghippo: il giochino partiva con l’impostazione della grafica nativa, ma non se impostata su quella emulata (che credo sia l’unica utilizzabile nel browser), ma già è qualcosa: il vino inscatolato potrebbe tornarci utile quantomeno per creare repack di giochi che, con un singolo file che parte sia su Windows che su Linux, si giocano e basta senza alcun imprevisto dei soliti del gaming PC… 🦜
Però allora ho pensato: se quello che cambia tra build nativa e web di Boxedwine è solo il codice macchina dell’emulatore (e le sue chiamate all’API host), che però esegue sempre le stesse robe precise al suo interno, com’è che escono fuori quegli strani problemi di compatibilità, tipo il fatto che Wine 5.0 non parte sul browser? La risposta è: il 5.0 che ho provato io non è lo stesso che scarica la versione desktop. Questo è saltato fuori dopo che ho provato a far partire quello da web, e in effetti non crasha come l’altro giorno! E, addirittura, ci gira il 6.0, che nemmeno credevo fosse supportato! Detto in modo diverso: questo progetto è mantenuto un po’ a culo da quello che vedo, ci sono diversi download nominalmente equivalenti sulle diverse pagine ufficiali, sia di questi filesystem Wine che dell’emulatore in sé (ma per quello non c’è dubbio che la versione migliore sia quella dal Jenkins). 🧬
https://octospacc.altervista.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Screenshot_20240527-160241_Firefox-Beta.pngPer fare tutte le prove possibili voglio ora avere sotto mano tutte le versioni dei rootfs che trovo, varie impostazioni di emulazione, e il caricamento immediato di applicazioni diverse, quindi ho iniziato a tirare su questo wrapper per la versione HTML; modificare file di configurazione o parametri URL ogni minuto era diventato doloroso, e la UX del launcher PC è scomodissima. Per ora è sul server casalingo, perché così posso applicare al volo modifiche ai file, ma se dovessi mettere troppe app e finire lo spazio allora creerò una repo Git. Boxedwine desktop offriva per il download anche queste tante altre versioni, quindi le ho messe… ma alcune sembrano ugualmente rognose (tra cui le 1.x, ironicamente), quindi indagherò meglio. Per il lago d’uria: https://hlb0.octt.eu.org/Misc/BoxedWine/ 💦https://octospacc.altervista.org/2024/05/27/lo-scatolvino-di-distrazione/
Hey #gaming#nerds, I have a question. Is there anything like a "container" to run #games in? I want to run some older games, but don't want to dirty up my main #Windows install with whatever interesting choices their developers made back in the #Win95 days. I've considered running a #VM with #Linux and playing the games with #Proton or #WINE, but thought I'd ask here first.
Press 1 - 6 to select/launch/reset any of the examples
Press Space to download screenshot
Apart from the raster bars and lissajous curve all other demos can be interacted with via mouse
Open the browser console to see the (already transpiled) source code of all examples
Example #1: Scribble & color cycling
Hold down left mouse button to cycle the colors (the current palette is also always shown in bottom-left corner). Nice, powerful oldskool effect, which is actually easier to do with these indexed, non-RGB pixel buffers[1]
Example #2: Lissajous bobs
The spheres are actually 2x2 tiles of 8x8 pixel sprites with one color slot chosen as transparency. Drawing 100 spheres here, but could be a lot more...
Example #3: Raster bars
This oldskool effect is achieved via HSYNC interrupts only, i.e. no lines are being drawn — for every single pixel row we simply change the color value of the first palette entry. The text is also only being drawn once, at startup...
Example #4: Particle system
Simple particle system (2k particles) with the emitter position linked to the mouse. 6% probability for larger particles.
Example #5: Random pattern
Classic oldskool generative art, here by defining 4 custom bitmap font characters and then drawing a single randomly chosen char per frame
Example #6: Bitmap font editor
Select a character on the RHS to edit in the left box. Left click to set a pixel, right click to clear it. Press Delete to clear the char entirely. The system supports proportional width fonts and the little red triangle can be moved horizontally to adjust the width of each char... Clicking on the Save button will download a JSON file of the font's binary data (9 bytes per char: width + 8 data bytes)
In preparation for teaching a 3-day "Computing within limits" workshop @ University of Applied Sciences in Augsburg, almost exactly a year ago (next week) I created a little fantasy console (heavily inspirered by TIC80) to introduce students to:
the idea of virtual machines / computing environments
the freedom to design & control any aspect of that environment (and how this relates to the overall idea of personal computing these days)
designing & building a small (virtual) env from the bottom up (incl. defining opcodes, memory limits, maps/regions, device control registers, interrupts (hsync/vsync), device I/O, comms & multi-tasking possibilities, various retro-computing inspired graphics techniques)
defining a small low-level API/language for creative coding
learning about binary/hex and how that knowledge translates visually
The short video gives an overview of five small examples & tools (incl. a bitmap font editor) I had prepared for the workshop — the entire system was built within a couple of days with http://thi.ng/umbrella and incl. examples is only 12KB (gzipped). In the workshop we later ended up mostly using the TIC80 instead, since we covered quite a few other wider perma- & retro-computing related topics too... The 3 days were barely enough to provide an overview and have some exploration time...
If anyone is interested in a similar workshop, please do let me know, I'm keen to repeat it/extend it...
(Ps. I will post a link to the interactive version later too)
This morning, a colleague (a sysadmin who works exclusively on Red Hat) needed to quickly create a VM for a reverse proxy. Among the requirements:
Minimal, only for nginx
Root file system on btrfs (I don't know why, but it's their internal policy)
Be online ASAP
I swiftly installed Alpine Linux for them. With just two commands, I set up the root on btrfs and got the setup running. Within a minute, the VM was up; in ten seconds, nginx was installed, and within two minutes, it was configured.
They were amazed by the speed and lightness of it all, as well as the updated kernel.
Alpine Linux remains, in my opinion, an excellent and flexible solution in the Linux environment.
Always try desktop Linux distributions on real hardware! Do not use virtual machines.
Linux desktops heavily rely on graphics acceleration to deliver a good experience. Most VM tools are meant for servers and do not have good (if any) GPU support.
@thurrott You do know 9 out of 9 of these issues could be solved with your 15 inch #MacBook Air or #Ubuntu#Linux. 😁But I understand for practical purposes since you write about #Windows for a living. A suggestion though for others who still need to use Windows for work or other purposes is maybe move it to a #VM. What keeps frustrating me is how much #MicrosoftEdge has its tentacles deep into the system. Every time I open it, my laptop fan starts spinning like crazy.
Ich teste gerade den #VM-Manager von #synology. Weil HomeAssistant nur sinnvoll in einer VM läuft und nicht als Docker. Spanennd was die da alles so einbauen... ih bin begeistert ;)
It's a tiny bit annoying to share files between a linux host to a windows guest.
Right now, I have a firewall-protected samba server that can only be connected to from my VM to share files but I don't love this. When I tried webdav sharing via spice, though, the performance was too slow and a bit annoying to work around.
J'ai besoin d'aide pour utiliser une logiciel windows sur Linux (debian).
Il s'agit de lightroom, un logiciel photo.
J'ai essayé wine, ça ne fonctionne pas.
Je pense qu'il faut une VM mais je n'ai jamais touché ce type d'outils et un peu d'aide serai la bienvenue ! #linux#VM#help
Speaking of Linux (sorry to go on about it), I've been running Linux Mint in a vm all day and can totally see myself making it my primary OS.
So now I'm thinking about buying a dedicated laptop. Does anybody know much about hardware and the Lenovo ThinkPad L13 G2's (not Yoga) compatibility? Searches aren't coming up with much.
Never really knew or thought about this, but DOS applications running under Windows were running in a virtual machine. Either emulated or on the Intel 80386 processor also with hardware virtualization.
Received a call from a potential new client today. They need a server to host their website, a small e-commerce platform, and a shared file storage solution. I suggested a FreeBSD-based solution with jails but was asked for alternatives without any explanation. So, I offered Linux options, possibly with Docker services, LXC containers, or separate VMs. Still, they requested other solutions. I started explaining about an OpenBSD-based approach with separate VMs for each service, or even NetBSD. Again, alternatives were requested.
At that point, I paused and asked, 'Do you have any specific solution in mind?' The reply was, 'Something based on Windows or, at most, MacOS. I don’t trust this free stuff, it might be okay for universities, but the real world is something else.'
I hadn’t heard such a statement in over 20 years. I began to explain... to no avail. I also mentioned that I work with these systems, not Windows or MacOS on servers (???). With an air of superiority, they insisted that’s what they wanted and had no budget limits to get it.
I quoted them 50,000 euros. The call ended within the next 30 seconds. 🤣
With recent news that Broadcom is "strong arming users onto subscriptions," we thought it would be a good time to remind folks of QEMU generic machine emulator and virtualizer. Read more: https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/QEMU#QEMU#VM#VirtualMachine#GNU