Wine Developers Working To Get 1997 Era "Nuclear Strike" Game Working On Linux In 2024

While Wine (and downstreams like Valve's Proton) allow many newer Windows games and applications to run very well on modern Linux systems even when it comes to recent Direct3D 12 games and the like, sometimes it's the older games/apps that can be more of a headache to workaround bugs in the software and other aging relics. One of the latest issues leading to an upstream Linux kernel discussion is over the game Nuclear Strike first published in 1997 for Microsoft Windows 98 in trying to get it running with Wine on Linux.

Elizabeth Figura with CodeWeavers has been dealing with trying to get Nuclear Strike running on Wine for crossing one more bug off the list. This Windows 98 game relies on direct VGA access and currently some troubles with Wine given its way of directly accessing the video memory.

Figura brought it to the upstream Linux kernel developers in brainstorming ways for better figuring out SGDT (Store Global Descriptor Table) emulation for Wine. For newer Intel and AMD processors with User Mode Instruction Prevention (UMIP) support it's easier to deal with SGDT emulation for wine than pre-UMIP Intel/AMD processors but Figura brought it up with the LKML crew to see about better ways of handling SGDT emulation for ultimately supporting this 1997 game on Linux under Wine in 2024.

The responses is that on UMIP-enabled processors should be easy enough to handle, but for non-UMIP cases the recommendation is for Wine developers to explore interacting with KVM directly. Peter Anvin recommended:

"For the non-UMIP case, and probably for a lot of other corner cases like relying on certain magic selector values and what not, the best option really would be to wrap the code in a lightweight KVM container. I do *not* mean running the Qemu user space part of KVM; instead have Wine interface with /dev/kvm directly.

Non-KVM-capable hardware is basically historic at this point."

In response though Wine developers feel leveraging KVM directly for such corner cases would likely be impractical and there are performance implications as well. Prior explorations around leveraging virtualization support with Wine was found to be "unworkably slow". Longtime Wine developer Stefan Dösinger remarked, "I don't think running Wine inside KVM is ever going to be realistic."

At least for those with newer At least for those with newer AMD (Zen 2+) and Intel processors with UMIP support there is a path forward for working on this SGDT emulation to potentially getting EA's Nuclear Strike game from 1997 running well on Linux in 2024. Those wanting to follow the Linux kernel mailing list discussion on the topic can do so via lore.kernel.org.