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Comment by avidiax | Hacker News Reader

http://www.boxedwine.org/demo/

Very light games are playable. I'm sure that legacy line-of-business software would have zero trouble.

I worked on the emscripten/wasm build of boxedwine. I can answer some questions. The project has been around in some form for 9 years. It was originally in java, then straight c, now c++. Main author previously worked on jdosbox. I previously ported jdosbox to become jsdosbox (via GWT) a decade ago.

Wow, I managed to run 3D Pinball Space Cadet at a fluid 60fps with audio disabled. This is a pretty mind-boggling thing to have exist.

Even runs on iPad FF ! wow indeed

An iPad is pretty fast. The iPad Pro M1 is faster than quite a lot of brand new laptops.

Runs horribly on macOS Firefox but, does indeed run at 60fps in Chrome with audio turned off. I wonder why the audio is such a problem? I'd think that audio wouldn't be that expensive even in an emulated environment.

I have no idea of the details as to why, but in all the years I've used emulators, turning off the audio has always increased the speed of emulation in emulators that are struggling.

I realize Wine is not an emulator...but...same shit.

Probably something to do with html5 audio api

Processing audio is expensive, when done by the CPU.

The WASM build uses the 'normal' CPU core. In this core the CPU emulator is a collection of indirect calls that performs poorly in WASM due the runtime checks to verify the number of parameters and their types. For other builds there is a dynamic code generator. A similar approach would work wonders. Assistance gratefully accepted! - see source folders under emulation/cpu for armv7, armv8 & x32 for the 30 odd method implementations. To get native like performance a binary translator like that used for the x64 core is required

I tried AoE in safari but that didn't work.. works in firefox though

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