Winulator - short introduction

You've reached the first post about Winulator. What is this about? Some of us who grew up in the 90's, still feeling amorous with some of the games from that era. Almost two decades later, mobile devices are becoming the new PCs. Originally I came from a Windows-based world on my early programming days, so I felt inclined to bring some of the games too.

I am not referring to the old DOS games. Those already have emulators for Android and iOS. I am talking about games released for Windows 95/98, based on DirectX APIs. Those games assume a Pentium 90Mhz CPU, and usually no more than 256MB of memory. You have guessed right - today's mobile phones and tablets are strong enough to run these games.

However, some adapting needs to be done, and this is where Winulator takes its place. The OS is entirely different. Not a problem, we can implement the DirectX and Win32 calls. But wait! The CPUs architectures are different - if only these games were compiled for ARM instead of Intel. Also not a problem. We can either perform just-in-time compilation between the two architectures, or - we can convert the entire binary before it runs. And what about touchscreens? We will deal with that later.

At the current state, the app is still in development - but stay tuned - I plan to put some nice screenshots and demo of the app running the lovely PC game Caesar III on my two Android devices.