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Add an entry answering the eternal question: 

When will Wine integrate an x86 CPU emulator?
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Francois Gouget 2003-08-22 05:10:25 +00:00 committed by Alexandre Julliard
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</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question id="Integrate-an-x86-emulator">
<para>When will Wine integrate an x86 CPU emulator so we can
run Windows applications on non-x86 machines?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>
The short answer is 'probably never'. Remember, Wine Is Not a
(CPU) Emulator. The long answer is that we probably don't want or
need to integrate one in the traditional sense.
</para>
<para>
Integrating a CPU emulator in Wine would be extremely hard,
due to the large number of Windows APIs and the complex
datatypes they exchange. It is not uncommon for a Windows API to
take three or more pointers to structures composed of many fields,
including pointers to other complex structures. For each of these
we would need a conversion routine to deal with the byte order and
alignment issues. Furthermore, Windows also contains many callback
mechanisms that constitute as many extra places where we would have
to handle these conversion issues. Wine already has to deal with
16 vs. 32 bit APIs and Ansi vs. Unicode APIs which both
introduce significant complexity. Adding support for a CPU emulator
inside Wine would introduce at least double that complexity and
only serve to slow down the development of Wine.
</para>
<para>
Fortunately another solution exists to run Windows applications
on non-x86 platforms: run both Wine and the application inside the
CPU emulator. As long as the emulator provides a standard Unix
environment, Wine should only need minimal modifications. What
performance you loose due to Wine running inside the emulator
rather than natively, you gain in complexity inside of Wine.
Furthermore, if the emulator is fast enough to run Windows
applications, Photoshop for instance, then it should be fast enough
to run that same Windows application plus Wine.
</para>
<para>
Two projects have started along those lines: <ulink
url="http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/">QEMU</>, an
open-source project, and <ulink
url="http://www.transitives.com/tech_overview.htm">Dynamite</>,
a commercial CPU emulator environment from
<ulink url="http://www.transitives.com/">Transitives Technologies</>
which has been <ulink
url="http://www.transgaming.com/news.php?newsid=37">paired
with Wine</>.
</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question id="Why-would-anyone-want-Wine-Windows-suck">
<para>Why would anyone want Wine? Doesn't Windows suck?</para>