Every once a while, I get the itch to replay SimTower. Unfortunately, the latest times I've attempted, something in WINE manages to interact so poorly with the window manager that it crashes X altogether. This has led me to poke at it to consider either building my own version of WINE that doesn't crash my desktop or building my own UI on top of the existing 16-bit code in a franken-build to make it work.
I've been leaning towards the latter, partially because I have an idea to replace one of the functions that's currently implemented as a horrible irreducible CFG that's a pain to understand with... some 16-bit AVX instructions. Mostly for the amusement of saying that I have used 16-bit AVX instructions.
This post is very timely, as I got the itch to setup and play simtower literally last week.
I used dosbox to install Windows 3.1, then installed simtower in that. It's not the native window manager integration you'd get in wine, but worked very well. Some ui glitches but nothing that affected usability.
I've been leaning towards the latter, partially because I have an idea to replace one of the functions that's currently implemented as a horrible irreducible CFG that's a pain to understand with... some 16-bit AVX instructions. Mostly for the amusement of saying that I have used 16-bit AVX instructions.