Astral is a hobby operating system written in C for 64bit architectures, with a collection of ported software like X.org, fvwm, the xbps package manager, and tons more. I think it’s quite a neat system – the code’s on GitHub – made even neater by the fact it can run not only Minecraft, but now also has a working port of Wine that can run a few games.
A few months ago, I posted about Astral, a hobby OS I have been working on over the years, running Minecraft. Since then, others have gotten modern versions of Minecraft to run as well as Factorio (using a glibc compatible libc). However, while these games are made or packaged in a way that makes it easier to get them to run under a new OS, most games are not. A lot of games are closed source and compiled for Windows, which makes something like Wine a necessity for playing them.
One of my favorite games, Cogmind, falls under that umbrella. It is a 32-bit Windows only roguelike, and it became my goal to run it under Astral. While there was already an existing Wine port, it was extremely incomplete, as not even
↫ Blog post on the Astral websitenotepad.exeworked properly. To run Cogmind, the Wine port had to be finished, which also meant adding the ability to run 32-bit code on an otherwise 64-bit-only OS.
This process obviously is quite involved, but in the end, they managed to get it working. Quite impressive.
I feel the urge to make a “Yes, but can it run Crysis” joke… but with my favourite Win16 app, Bricklayer.