Winulator

[gonzoMD]

Did you heard of this? It's an Android App that let Win9x games run.
Maybe the developer could help ReactOS?
Here an article: http://blog.laptopmag.com/winulator-app ... to-android

[fred02]

Is the source code available? Could not find it.
The jDOSBox author also experimented with it by porting Wine code to DOSBox: http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.p ... 120#257878

[gonzoMD]

no its a closed source project

But maybe we could contact the dev and present him ReactOS.
I read somewhere that there is no Wine code in Winulator but cuz of the closed source I don't know.

EDIT:
fred02: I did many Times think about that Freedos + Wine/Arwinss could be about 70% of this what FreeWin95 should be in the past.

Is this similar to this what you linked?

[fred02]

no its a closed source project

But maybe we could contact the dev and present him ReactOS.
I read somewhere that there is no Wine code in Winulator but cuz of the closed source I don't know.

EDIT:
fred02: I did many Times think about that Freedos + Wine/Arwinss could be about 70% of this what FreeWin95 should be in the past.

Is this similar to this what you linked?

More or less. From what I understood from reading the thread, parts of the Win32 GUI calls are implemented using Wine code as inspiration/reference. Of course the original code was probably heavily modified since it was ported to Java, but the whole approach should be similar to the HX DOS Extender's DPMILD32's one. To be sure, one can have to look at the source code, which is available in this case.
I have no idea why Caesar 3 was chosen as "guinea pig" by both projects. A wild guess would be because it uses very few GUI functions.
This is probably the limitation of Winulator: you have to add applications one by one, while with ARWINSS ROS will have compatibility almost on par with Wine. From what I understood from the other threads, the memory manager module bugs are the major limitation for the application compatibility of ROS right now.

[danoon]

I'm not sure why I chose Caesar 3 for jDosbox, I think Age of Empire was my first choice which I did eventually get to work. But I also experimented with many other games and probably just whittled the field down to one that had the easiest API to implement. If memory serves me, then Caesar 3 had no Windows GUI controls. I gave up, at least for now, when I came across Diablo since it required dialog templates for the menus. Considering that Diablo also ran on PPC Mac, I was shocked to see such Windows specific code in the menus.

[jonaspm]

Are you saying that you're the dev of Winulator?

[DOSGuy]

He's the dev of jDosbox.

[jonaspm]

He's the dev of jDosbox.

Oh ok, thanks!

[livestrong2109]

Dam for a second I thought you guys where telling me that AOE worked on Android... I was about to toss my iPhone4s into the trash bin... lol!

[DOSGuy]

Hmm. I've just read that Google provides a tool for recompiling Java code into a Dalvik-friendly format for Android. Performance would probably suck unless you have a very powerful processor in your phone, but it's at least possible that you could play AoE in jDosbox on Android.

[PascalDragon]

Hmm. I've just read that Google provides a tool for recompiling Java code into a Dalvik-friendly format for Android. Performance would probably suck unless you have a very powerful processor in your phone, but it's at least possible that you could play AoE in jDosbox on Android.

Ehm... you do know that this tool is part of the standard Android development toolchain? In Eclipse you compile your code against Java Bytecode versions of the Android classes and then (in the background) your class files will be converted to Dalvik bytecode which will then be packaged in an application bundle ready for installation on the device.

Regards,
Sven

[DOSGuy]

Most of that was gibberish to me. I think you're agreeing with me?

[huckleberrypie]

Having to convert Windows API calls and stuff to an ARM-friendly format would be a drag, and in practice I think this would somewhat be like Transgaming's Cider wrapper for (hastily) porting Windows games to Mac.

[PascalDragon]

Most of that was gibberish to me.

Sorry, I got carried away with my developer speak there

I think you're agreeing with me?

I was mostly referring to "I just read that Google provides a tool" and "Performance would probably suck". As I wrote above the tool is part of the normal development chain (basically like ReactOS uses gcc or MSVC) and thus is nothing special (to Android developers). Also every single application for Android that is written in Java goes through this conversion process. So performance might not be as bad as you think, especially since modern Android devices have quite powerful CPUs and GPUs.

Regards,
Sven

[DOSGuy]

jDosbox runs like a Pentium Pro 200 on my Core i7 3770 @ 4 GHz under TurboBoost. (And yes, jDosbox does benchmark higher on a fast PC than a slow PC.) Officially, AoE needs at least a Pentium 90, but I'm not sure that a mobile ARM processor could provide that much performance in jDosbox. With all due respect to Android phones, I truly hope that my PC is several times faster than a phone.

I was just pointing out that it's possible to play AoE on an Android phone, but I can't promise what the experience will be like.