Boxedwine

Release 26R1

WARNING: I consider this beta software, some apps and games will not run, some will crash randomly while others will appear to run flawlessly.

Changes From 25R1

• 50% Faster for all platforms except Web/WASM. Uses 20% less memory for 64-bit builds.
• Added Wine 11 suport
• Added OpenGL on top of D3D12 for Windows ARM64 build
• Improved audio for Web builds, still not perfect

About

Boxedwine is an emulator that runs 32-bit Windows applications. It achieves this by running a 32-bit version of Wine, and emulating the Linux kernel and CPU. It is written in C++ with SDL and is supported on multiple platforms.

Boxedwine is open source and released under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL).

Getting Started

To get started, download the binaries for the platform you want, then simply launch the app. If its the first time running on your system it will automatically download the latest Wine/Linux file system, which for this release is Wine 11.0.

Boxedwine UI will contain some demos in the Install tab that you can try, or you can install your own apps and games. You can even drag installers or directories into the UI.

Troubleshooting

The goal of Boxedwine is to be able to run everything that Wine can. If you want to know if your app or game will run in Boxedwine or get hints how to run it, you should start by looking at the Wine Application Database (AppDB) at https://appdb.winehq.org/

I have focused most of my effort getting games before the year 2010 to run, so anything after that might have more issues. Self modifying code and JITs are the hardest to run, so Java and DotNet do not run, but currently simple DotNet games with Mono do (see the demo Solitaire).

If you have a game or app that was released before 2010 and it runs on Wine, but does not work with Boxedwine, let me know. You can file an issue here: https://github.com/danoon2/Boxedwine/issues

Web Version

If you want to test out the Web version of Boxedwine, please test your app or game with the Mac, Windows or Linux version first. If that works then move on to

https://github.com/danoon2/Boxedwine/blob/master/docs/How-To-Create-FileSystem-For-Web.md

To see 26R1 running some examples: http://boxedwine.org/v/26R1/

Linux

This runs well on Linux, my automation tests run on Asahi Linux on Mac Mini (ARM64) and on Linux Mint (x64). You can compile this yourself pretty easily. See https://github.com/danoon2/Boxedwine/blob/master/docs/How-To-Build-Boxedwine.md

Things that work

• DirectDraw, Direct3D and OpenGL all work pretty well.
• 16-bit Windows apps and installers
• Copy/Paste
• Networking works alright, but is not perfect
• Vulkan is a work in progress. vkQuake runs well and some games work with the DXVK option

Things that don't work and are on my radar

• DotNet 8
• Java
• Hardware OpenGL on Mac only works on a few OpenGL games, for the most part the software OpenGL LLVM Pipe is used
• Joystick
• Surround Sound
• Mounting ISO's