Naa, I used to be Windows kernel dev for Intel. The backwards compatibility comes from the WoW64 translation layer in 64bit Windows. WSL1 was built off the same framework. WoW64 worked pretty good back then. Apparently there is enough drift now that you’ll get the occasional old game or program that doesn’t translate well under 64bit Windows anymore but, works under WINE. Rare, but still good for a laugh.
We could do the same under Linux, but it just seems pointless for Linux. Linux has chroot. Steam Runtime is based on containers which are based on chroot. Chroot is how we played 32bit games on 64bit Linux distros back before distro maintainers started including 32bit libraries with their 64bit install images.
Naa, I used to be Windows kernel dev for Intel. The backwards compatibility comes from the WoW64 translation layer in 64bit Windows. WSL1 was built off the same framework. WoW64 worked pretty good back then. Apparently there is enough drift now that you’ll get the occasional old game or program that doesn’t translate well under 64bit Windows anymore but, works under WINE. Rare, but still good for a laugh.
We could do the same under Linux, but it just seems pointless for Linux. Linux has chroot. Steam Runtime is based on containers which are based on chroot. Chroot is how we played 32bit games on 64bit Linux distros back before distro maintainers started including 32bit libraries with their 64bit install images.