Guide for BOX86 and BOX64 with wine on the Pocket Reform?

MNT Pocket Reform
24

I recently got around to loading my mnt reform 2 up with the rcore rk3588 board and got box/wine working.

This is certainly not a minimalist solution, but…

Keep in mind:

  • That armhf is arm32
  • box86 is to run i386 linux binaries
  • box64 is to run amd64 linux binaries
  • wine 9.x-ish+ with wow64 will be a linux amd64 binary that can run windows 32 and 64 bit binaries
  • wine versions 9.5-ish+ seem to have some issues with box32/64 at time of writing

Vague steps:

  1. Add the armhf, i386, and amd64 architectures to dpkg
  2. Add box86 repository from: GitHub - ryanfortner/box86-debs: automated box86 debian/apt repository
  3. Add box64 repository from: GitHub - ryanfortner/box64-debs: automated box64 debian/apt repository
  4. Install both box86 and box64 from apt
  5. Download a pre-built wine64 with wow64, such as: https://github.com/Kron4ek/Wine-Builds/releases/download/9.21/wine-9.21-staging-amd64-wow64.tar.xz
  6. Unzip this wherever, I use $HOME/wine
  7. Run wine inside box64, so you’ll do something like this for setup: box64 $HOME/wine/bin/wine wineboot

A little extra legwork is required to get things like unity games to work, you’ll need vulkan stuff installed.

After all this:

At this point you should have all your base requirements set up to run just about any linux/windows binary that is capable of running.

The rest of the resolution for individual games/programs will be summary searching for individual game quirk workarounds/wine tweaks and installing dependencies for box32/64 to wrap things for you.

Keeping in mind if the binary you’re trying to run is:

  • linux/i386, install the armhf version of the library
  • linux/amd64, install the arm64 version of the library
  • windows/i386, install the i386 version of the library
  • windows/amd64, install the amd64 version of the library

Generally speaking you don’t want to ever blindly install libraries for other architectures if they cause any kind of dependency conflict, that’s a good way to break your OS in hard to fix ways.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I bet the rcore board is capable of driving qemu at decent speeds and might run windows acceptably.

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