How hard would be to play Warcraft3 and Age of Empire II DE on the MNT

1

Hello!

I am looking to get the MNT Reform Next. It is equipped with a 8-core Rockchip RK3588 processor and Mali G610 GPU, with 16 or 32 GB LPDDR4 RAM.

I read a bit of gaming in the following threads: MNT Reform Gaming Thread and Can you use the RK3588 for Gaming?

Beside I just stumble upon Signal Messenger and the Reform Laptop showing that it is not that smooth to run x86 program on it.

So here I am, wondering if I would be able to play my childhood RTS on it: Warcraft 3 and Age of Empire 2 DE.

Any one did it? Will Warcraft3 work in a LAN setup? Did anyone try AoE II DE online?

Thank you!

2

Hi,

in the past, I’ve played games like Factorio (not Space Age) or Starcraft Broodwar on the RK3588 without issues.

I’m also maintaining the box64 package in Debian.

The challenge for Warcraft 3 is, that it is a 32bit game. You named your link “box64 compatibility list” but it actually redirects to the box86 compatibility list. box64 emulates x86_64 windows exec4utables. box86 emulates x86_32 executables. Luckily, wine implemented wow64 mode which means we can use 64bit wine to run 32bit windows applications and box64 can emulate 64bit wine. Unfortunately, wine packaging in Debian is not up-to-date and suffers from a few RC bugs. Help welcome! This also means that the latest version 11 of wine which marked the official release of wow64 is not packaged yet.

On the other hand, if you don’t mind installing packages which are not from Debian, there are projects like GitHub - AndreRH/hangover: Hangover runs Win64 and Win32 applications on arm64 Linux · GitHub which is using a few techniques to improve running x86 windows binaries on arm Linux. I tried hangover with warcraft 3 and frozen throne. I installed both games from CD but didn’t get very far. The installers run fine but the game stalls infinitely in the loading screen and doesn’t start… :frowning:

I cannot try AoE2 because I do not have a CD for it anymore. It got lost at some point… :frowning: