[HN Gopher] MiceWine - run Windows applications and games on And...
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MiceWine - run Windows applications and games on Android
smartphones
Author : bj-rn
Score : 155 points
Date : 2024-12-30 08:38 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| fermuch wrote:
| How is this different to winlator? It seems to depend on termux
| dizhn wrote:
| Which winlator ? :) People are rightly very suspicious of
| windows emulators coming out every day. Wonder why we haven't
| seen this in emulator forums.
| spidermonkey23 wrote:
| Interesting, I've not heard of this one before. Most of the
| emulation community has settled on 'Winlator' as the main android
| windows emu of choice. Before this it was Exagear, but winlator
| is easier to get started with. Another route is using proof
| termux with a DE like xfce and connecting with X but not sure how
| good this setup is for pure gaming performance, but may be a good
| option for Dev work.
| popcar2 wrote:
| Winlator will still be the best option in the near future but
| the community has been really wanting alternatives since
| Winlator isn't fully open source. The lead dev develops outside
| of the repo and appears every few months with an update, but
| never released the source code for the newest version (8.0)
|
| Now the community is split into multiple forks of version 7.1
| in order to add new features & fixes, like Winlator Frost and
| coffincolors' fork. It's hampering progress and makes the scene
| very confusing to navigate, so we're rooting for a neater
| alternative, whether that's MiceWine or whatever else is coming
| up.
| beAbU wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/927/
| andai wrote:
| How does this work? Does it run the x86_64 version of Wine in
| Box64? My understanding of wine was that it just translates API
| calls, shouldn't it work on any ISA then? (Or is most of a
| program / game math and that stuff would fail?)
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Box64 does the x64 to ARM translation (while keeping
| performance as high as possible by calling native ARM library
| code wherever possible). Throw Wine in there to implement the
| Windows APIs and you can run amd64 PE binaries on aarch64 with
| decent performance.
|
| You can't run amd64 without something like Box64 because Wine
| is not an emulator, so it doesn't interpret or rewrite the
| instructions to aarch64.
|
| You can use Box64 on other ISAs if you implement the necessary
| translation code. I believe this is what's being done to run
| games on RISC-V, but I'm not 100% sure. Good ol' qemu-static
| would also do the job if Box64 isn't compatible (yet), but
| that's running the entire application in a foreign architecture
| so the overhead would be a lot more significant.
| Vogtinator wrote:
| Can wine do ARM64X resp. ARM64EC to mix native aarch64 code
| with emulated x86(-64) code in the same process for better
| efficiency?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Wine doesn't do any of that as far as I know. It loads a
| Windows PE file, it's (placeholder) DLL dependencies, and
| starts executing at the main entrypoint. Box64 does
| translation and has some specific placeholder DLLs that
| intercept API calls and call native code rather than
| emulating the entire process.
|
| If what you describe is being done, it's being done by
| Box64. I don't know enough about aarch64 to know what
| ARM64X and ARM64EC do, though. I can find [a Github comment
| ](https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/pull/858#issuecomment-16
| 057...) where one of the authors states that the goal is to
| implement ARM64EC, but I wouldn't know what the status is
| on that.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| Another app that demands my dick pics (storage permission) and
| refuses to work without
| daghamm wrote:
| This is a bit surprising in 2024 (well almost 2025). Android
| has a really nice API for reducing the need for this
| permission, and most of it has been around sicnce android 10.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UnJ3amzJM94
|
| Maybe the author is not aware of these? How about opening an
| issue?
| moneytoo wrote:
| If the non SAF API provides even 1% better performance, it
| makes sense to use it. Especially for open source emulating
| software.
| maccard wrote:
| Does it in this case?
| anthk wrote:
| Ironically Lemuroid doesn't work on Android 8 due to SAF.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > really nice API
|
| Excuse me? SAF is awful and source of constant complaints
| from developers.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Mostly by folks that keep the mindset Android is GNU/Linux,
| instead of finally getting the point it is a managed OS
| that happens to use the Linux kernel as implementation
| detail.
| wiseowise wrote:
| How would you do it without storage permission? Win
| applications generally have dozens to hundreds of files.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Android applications can use their own private data
| directories just fine, you don't need any permission for
| that. Termux, for instance, can run entire Linux distros
| without ever being granted storage permissions.
|
| They can also request the user for a specific folder to get
| read/write permissions for (rather than the entire shared
| storage space).
|
| Just requesting full access to the entire shared storage is a
| lot easier to implement, but it's also not great for privacy
| and security. Google is trying to crack down on these
| permissions in the Play Store for this reason.
|
| Several apps have been caught extracting location history
| data from pictures stored in the camera directories already,
| so it's not a theoretical threat. Unfortunately, app
| developers have been reluctant to implement the (much better)
| specific file picker introduced in Android 4.4, but now
| they're being forced to if the want Google Play access in the
| future.
|
| The scoped storage API has some downsides, though, such as
| reduced performance. Not really a problem if all you want to
| do is upload a picture or save a document, but when you're
| running executables from there you may run into a wall. This
| can be circumvented by copying the files to the app's private
| data directory, but people may want to use the selected
| folder to copy output back to Android, and a copy action
| obviously doubles the space required at least temporarily.
|
| That being said, I believe applications shouldn't refuse to
| work entirely without full access to every file on the shared
| storage space. They can ask the user what they want to do if
| the storage permission is denied rather than refuse to work.
|
| Extra unfortunate is that the new file picker Google
| introduced a few months ago for media selection is absolutely
| terrible in my opinion (no directory support, just a flat
| list of images), but some other phone brands offer file
| pickers of their own.
| wiseowise wrote:
| I think both you and I agree that Android's implementation
| is awful. I don't think it is fair to blame developers
| because Google is being bad OS steward.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I don't think invidual developers are to blame
| necessarily, but Android developers at large have been
| ignoring privacy-friendly storage APIs for a literal
| decade at this point.
|
| While I have my problems with the current state of things
| in Android, I think the new mechanism is better as a
| whole than the old mechanism where every flashlight app
| could upload your nudes to the cloud without you knowing.
| Had the Android developer landscape jumped ship to these
| APIs earlier, I'm sure the kinks would've been worked out
| years ago.
|
| The unfortunate lesson Google seems to have learned is
| that giving developers the option to use safer, privacy-
| friendly APIs that put the user in control doesn't work,
| and forcefully disabling old APIs and forcing developers
| to update their apps to comply does. Hardly a surprise,
| to be honest, given Android's ecosystem is still full of
| shovelware and third-party "ad libraries" filled with
| adware and stalkerware (often making use of an app's
| legitimate permissions for nefarious means). I'd like
| Google to crack down on these, at least on their store,
| but then I'm sure we'd see weeks of HN threads about how
| Google broke the latest and greatest app by altering the
| API.
| sureglymop wrote:
| On GrapheneOS (an android AOSP fork) there is a "storage
| scopes" feature such that one can give permission only to
| select directories or files. I recommend this if you care a lot
| about this.
| bangaladore wrote:
| One big plus I found when switching to Apple after using
| Android phones for 10+ year was essentially always scoping
| file/photo storage.
|
| It seems like a pretty easy thing to do, and I don't know why
| its not common / not a thing on common Android phones.
| leshenka wrote:
| oh man i hate when this happens. Same thing on ios,
| applications want photo access and refuse to use the system
| photo picker and leave me with a very uncomfortable dilemma.
| And it's not like only small apps from indie devs that don't
| know better, it's actually the opposite.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Even scanning metadata, exif tags can be valuable. So I'm not
| surprised that larger companies do this.
| xnx wrote:
| I blame Android for not providing fake/empty storage to an app
| when permission is not granted.
| skeledrew wrote:
| This is asking for trouble when someone accidentally doesn't
| provide and fails to realize, or deliberately doesn't and
| have forgotten the choice later on when they may want to.
| anonymfus wrote:
| I believe most of the commercial Android phones already
| have a regular task that resets permissions for unused apps
| to serve people who gave permissions accidentally or
| forgotten about them after setting them deliberately.
| n144q wrote:
| You think that kind of solution is understandable for an
| average user, like an uncle who has little computer
| knowledge?
| bbarnett wrote:
| Should we target the lowest common denominator?
|
| Should remove all books above a grade 10 reading level,
| since most people can barely read?
| sionisrecur wrote:
| Average user would not care if their files are in an
| application specific folder.
| sirjaz wrote:
| Now someone needs to make it work the other way. Android apps on
| Windows!
| givinguflac wrote:
| It exists; but not for much longer:
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/android/wsa/
| bitwize wrote:
| Well, there is BlueStacks...
| thereticent wrote:
| BlueStacks seems to work great for games. Compared to Nox
| anyway, and even that was so cool when I first found it. I've
| heard of LD Player as well but haven't used it.
|
| Is it more difficult to get non-gaming apps working?
| bangaladore wrote:
| Last I tried, many non-gaming apps do not function anymore
| because google identifies the device as non-physical.
|
| I think its opt-in by the app developer, Authy (shitty
| company, I'm aware) does not work on Bluestacks. That's a
| pain, because I've used Bluestacks to migrate auth codes
| before.
| rkagerer wrote:
| This is great! There are so many fantastic Windows games from the
| pre-smartphone era, before ads, in-app purchases, etc. came along
| and ruined things.
|
| BTW if you liked _X-Com: UFO Defense_ and want a blast from the
| past, try out _The X-Com Files_ [1]. It runs on the Android build
| of _OpenXcom_ [2], and it's not terribly difficult to set it up
| to sync Savegames between Android and your desktop.
|
| [1] https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?topic=4595.0
|
| [2] https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,5258.0.html
| mdaniel wrote:
| Dear GitHub: please consider providing a nudge for the owner to
| include a license when creating a public repo. Otherwise the fork
| button becomes kind of weird, right?
| do_not_redeem wrote:
| 1. Off topic
|
| 2. GitHub already does this. https://i.imgur.com/yAfwWGs.png
| pmontra wrote:
| Probably the default should not be None. There should be a
| mandatory license, either the Unlicense
| https://unlicense.org/ or something even simpler ("this is
| public domain".)
| MoreMoore wrote:
| To expand on this a bit, in many places a software project
| without a license means that all rights are reserved by the
| author and that nobody else has any legal right to use it
| in any way.
|
| I'm not sure if unlicense/public domain would be a better
| default though. _At the very least_ , that Github prompt
| should explicitly state with a warning what it means when
| you select "None" as the license. I think most people don't
| realize or know what it means for others who want to look
| at or use the project.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Odd choice of name, to my ear at least, given that Android
| devices rarely have mice...
| shams93 wrote:
| This is especially sweet for owners of high end android tablets,
| where if you have an android 16 tablet you can then run both
| windowws legacy apps and full linux desktop on the same device.
| qup wrote:
| How good is the desktop experience?
| offmycloud wrote:
| It would be great if this was on F-Droid.
| cess11 wrote:
| So, there's actually a chance I could play Populous: The
| Beginning on a tablet?
| preezer wrote:
| Maybe my dream comes true... Playing WoW on my Fold with a
| Controller without streaming.
| lykahb wrote:
| How does this work in practice once you run the application? The
| windows games are designed for a large screen and keyboard&mouse.
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(page generated 2024-12-30 23:00 UTC)