Astral is a hobby operating system with X.org, Minecraft, and now Wine

Astral is a hobby operating system written in C for 64bit architectures, with a collection of ported software like X.org, fvwm, the xbps package manager, and tons more. I think it's quite a neat system - the code's on GitHub - made even neater by the fact it can run not only Minecraft, but now also has a working port of Wine that can run a few games.

A few months ago, I posted about Astral, a hobby OS I have been working on over the years, running Minecraft. Since then, others have gotten modern versions of Minecraft to run as well as Factorio (using a glibc compatible libc). However, while these games are made or packaged in a way that makes it easier to get them to run under a new OS, most games are not. A lot of games are closed source and compiled for Windows, which makes something like Wine a necessity for playing them.

One of my favorite games, Cogmind, falls under that umbrella. It is a 32-bit Windows only roguelike, and it became my goal to run it under Astral. While there was already an existing Wine port, it was extremely incomplete, as not even notepad.exe worked properly. To run Cogmind, the Wine port had to be finished, which also meant adding the ability to run 32-bit code on an otherwise 64-bit-only OS.

Blog post on the Astral website

This process obviously is quite involved, but in the end, they managed to get it working. Quite impressive.