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During the ongoing Google for Games Developer Summit 2022 Keynote, one of the Google team just did a talk on "How to write a Windows emulator for Linux from scratch" to help Stadia.

They already have some existing work available to developers who want it, including their "Stadia Porting Toolkit" which actually uses DXVK to translate Direct3D to Vulkan (since Stadia is a Linux system). However, this translator seems to be their newer approach to running Windows games on Stadia.

With only three people working on it, presenter Marcin Undak said they were able to get some games to run but it's still in the R&D phase and not production ready yet with it taking considerable time to work per-game. However, work is ongoing to hook it all up together with Wine and Proton (for 32-bit games specifically they said) which is one of the paths they will be considering going forwards.

There's already Wine and Proton, which are mentioned in the talk as well but it seems Google wanted something different. Why though? One major reason is how thin Stadia is as a platform. While it is Linux, it's stripped down to the core and doesn't have everything Wine needs to build. There's also a ton of things they don't have to care about that normal desktops do and so "90%" of Wine is simply not needed they said. Additionally, Wine is also apparently challenging when it comes to the build system and debugging.

Quite a technical talk but it's quite nicely presented, to give you a basic overview of what they're doing without going into super tech-heavy details to fry your brain if you're not a developer.

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They are also finally about to open the Stadia store without the need to be signed in, so you will be able to actually look around. Incredible it took them this long to do such a basic thing, I can't imagine how many people that put off. Just think if Steam didn't let you view store pages or anything without a login.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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elmapul Mar 16, 2022
Quoting: ShmerlThis matches perfectly what Wine does. Arguing against it is just some ridiculous demagoguery I think, especially when this negative argument is hinged on vague criterion of "very little".

actually, it really do! o.o

Quoting: ShmerlThis idea matches Wine case as well. Particulars like groups in two rooms are the literal source of the term, but it's irrelevant to the concept behind it - avoiding copyright infringement. Are you going to argue you also literally need two rooms to fit it? It would be on the same level as a previous argument.

if wine was working direct on binaries to reverse then, we wouldnt have trouble running things like anti cheat , or any other thing that use hidden apis.
Shmerl Mar 16, 2022
I don't remember the exact example off hand, but I think they did handle some cases of "hidden features" or even bugs that they had to reverse engineer to make things work.

I'm not really familiar with anti-cheat issues, besides that some of them are kernel level rootkits, so you simply can't implement that in userspace which Wine does.


Last edited by Shmerl on 16 March 2022 at 11:24 pm UTC
kokoko3k Mar 17, 2022
Quoting: ShmerlWhat's with all this pointless mental gymnastics and arguing semantics for nothing?

Since F.Ultra is M.I.A., but I still think we need a recap, here it is:
* tohur says google can't do it because it is not possible to do reverse engineering in so little time, so they are using wine.
* mirv disagrees.
* elmapul says wine devs states they didn't reverse engineering windows
* mirv expresses that reverse engineering means disassembling, not reimplementing public interfaces
* f.ultra agrees that wine is not reverse engineering
* tohur insists in saying that wine is reverse engineering, specifically "clean room reverse engineering"
* f.ultra insists in saying wine is not reverse engineering and seems to give another definition of "clean room reverse engineering": "black-box reverse engineering"
* tohur specify that "black-box reverse engineering" = "clean room reverse engineering":
* F.Ultra explains that "clean room reverse engineering" is really different from "reverse engineering" and even different from "black box reverse engineering"
(My note: and he is actually/formally right: https://ethics.csc.ncsu.edu/intellectual/reverse/study.php even if it is a bit borderline IMHO, it may depends on the abstracion level used.)

* kokoko3k fails miserably and confuses "Clean room reverse engineering" with "black-box reverse engineering", but states: "apart from definitions, I think the concept seems clear to everyone." (please note: "apart from definitions")
* Shmerl directed to kokoko3k: "What's with all this pointless mental gymnastics and arguing semantics for nothing?"
...which is exactly what i said, so i don't have an answer for you, obviously, since my intent was to bypass the definitions and focus on the facts.

Facts are that wine is not built empirically. And apart from some minor, but still unintended and undocumented behaviour, wine devs don't need to deduce anything.
This is because they don't target a specific software, but the whole operating system so they don't need nor care to understand what functions are called by a specific software.
Given their goal, they know that they need to implement the whole thing, all of the public interfaces/functions available by using the available documentation.

To Over-simplify the process:

Microsoft Windows:
For every f function implemented in Windows, Microsoft tells you that given certain parameters and types, you have to expect his return vaule(s) to be in a certain way, but don't tells you how it arrives to the results.

Wine:
For every f function implemented in windows, I am free to implement it in whatever way i think is the best so that given the same parameters, the return value(s) will be the expected ones.

Since deduction is needed when you don't know something that has to be deduced, you are still free to call the wine development as you like, but rest sure that there's no deduction involved, and if there is, is by mistake, in the sense that it means Microsoft failed to document something, which is a corner case that also means that the return values of the above function are undetermined, which is obviously an unintended mistake/defect.

And here we can finally return to the cause of the dispute with a reasoned answer:
* tohur says google can't do it because they can't do reverse engineering in so little time, so they are using wine.

On the contrary, they can, in so little time, because they can:
1) use a "-insert something here- reverse engineering" to discover the windows subset of functions they need to implement
2) just use public available definitions of what they discovered in #1 to reimplement them as they please,as long as the documentation is not unintentionally lacking, hopefully, without deducing anything.


Last edited by kokoko3k on 17 March 2022 at 12:48 pm UTC
Shmerl Mar 17, 2022
Quoting: kokoko3kwine devs don't need to deduce anything

Having an API (description of behavior) and implementing it without having the source is still called reverse engineering, even if they don't need to deduce the required behavior outside of it.

That's what black box idea implies. You can observe the behavior, but you don't know the implementation. So you can implement similar behavior to the best of your ability. It's not a guarantee you won't encounter a case where black box will behave differently, but you are getting close enough to be similar in cases you tested.


Last edited by Shmerl on 17 March 2022 at 5:00 pm UTC
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