Yes, the goal of Boxedwine is to run old Windows programs in a platform independent way without a VM or disk images. So basically it is Dosbox but for Windows. At first I started out writing my own Win32 API implementation, and it worked for the first couple of games. But eventually I saw it was more than 1 person could do. That is when I realized Wine was the only solution and since that only worked on Linux, I had to create minimal Linux emulator to run Wine. Implementing the kernal syscalls did take some time. But It is capable to running emulated threads and processes in a single threaded app, which is why it works with Emscripten.

I tested it with 2 games (non-browser version, just by downloading it off the website) and was not able to get any of them working.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Duck:_Goin%27_Quackers Says error about not being able to find the CD-rom drive.

https://humongous.fandom.com/wiki/Putt-Putt:_Pep%27s_Birthda... I just get a error saying "Error É" whilst trying to run the executable.

Both do install fine into %APPDATA% though. I've tried both the x86/x64 versions executables of Boxedwine.

Mounting CD-rom directly, extracting it to ISO then to a folder doesn't seem to work either.

Do you happen to have any idea what I might be doing wrong or if those games are not yet supported at all?

Thanks

Just like Wine, Boxedwine won't work with games that have CD checks. If it is just trying to find the CD in order to play a video off of it or grab a large file it didn't install, that might work, but only if the code isn't making sure its a real CD device. Seems like my UI should be able to handle the user dragging an installer into it from a CD where the CD will be used again. For that to work it would need to copy the CD and mount it internally so that the program can find it again while running. Right now I don't do that, but I think that would be a useful enhancement that isn't too hard to do.

As for the Putt-Putt, that has the look of flash or Adobe Air. I know that things like Java, and .Net don't work yet in Boxedwine, so if it is doing any kind of JIT then it won't work. I added that to the list of games I should look at.

You got pretty unlucky if you only tried 2 older games like that and neither worked.

Yea that would be great!

I did get them working and playable some time ago on Linux using Wine though (my little brother likes to play them still, except he can't get used to Linux), even though they ask for CD-rom.

The Putt-Putt game is using some custom click 'n play Python2 based "SCUMM" engine, it doesn't require Java or .NET iirc. And I think they predate JIT a bit.

Try the 1st Deus Ex demo and the addon map.

Wine also runs on BSD and macOS, if anyone is curious about taking this approach with a different kernel interface.

This project is really clever and one the best things I've seen on here in a while.