By The free and open source Wine utility that allows you to run certain Windows applications on Linux and Mac computers is not an emulator, but rather a compatibility layer. The name is actually an abbreviation for Wine Is Not an Emulator.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t do some pretty cool things when you combine WINE. with an emulator. And one developer did just that to create Canned wine, a utility allows you to run certain Windows apps on the web or on a computer running Linux, Mac, or even Windows (which can be useful if you want to run older apps that don’t work with recent versions of Windows ).
In a nutshell, Boxedwine emulates the Linker kernel and an x86 processor, then runs an unmodified version of the 32-bit version of Wine, allowing you to run 16-bit or 32-bit supported on a host operating system. The developer is also working on a version that could run on the Raspberry Pi 4 or other devices with ARMv8 processors.
The software can be designed for Windows, Linux, Mac, or the web so you can run it on your own PC or server. But if you just want to give it a try, you can check out the Boxedwine demo site which currently has a few dozen apps and games that you can run in a web browser.
Some of them certainly work easier than others. Age of Empires was slow enough to be virtually unplayable. But the AbiWord word processor works well enough if you can handle a bit of input lag. But without access to the underlying file system, you cannot access any documents saved from the demo site, so the website is really just for testing, not for practical use.
Boxedwine is a free and open source tool and you can find the source code on GitHub and additional documentation on the Boxedwine website.
via Hacker News and / r / programming