ReactOS (FOSS "Windows") achieves 3D-accelerated Half-Life on real hardware

ReactOS (FOSS "Windows") achieves 3D-accelerated Half-Life on real hardware(phoronix.com)

111 points by jeditobe 3 hours ago | 15 comments

something I wondered for a while

do windows viruses get ported by such efforts as well?

TechSquidTV 55 minutes ago | |

Of course. Maybe not successfully but a "virus" is just software. If it runs software, it runs software, full stop. Maybe the same APIs are not available or behave differently, so it may be buggy or non-functional, but that's true of Half-Life here too.

augusto-moura 1 hour ago | |

Some, but not all, most don't. Ideally they would all work, ReactOS doesn't make a priority on being a "safer" option, just an open source option

canyp 1 hour ago | |

Somewhere in the docs they state that they must also recreate whatever bugs the API has, otherwise applications written with those bugs as an (implicit) assumption could misbehave.

naturalmovement 1 hour ago | |

Maybe worry about Linux malware which is a major problem right now everyone is in huge denial about, instead of throwing shade at a hobby OS emulating a 25 year old version of Windows.

ReactOS isn't the one that just had one of its package repos owned (again).

nvr219 26 minutes ago | | |

What's the major Linux malware problem that everyone is ignoring

chadgpt3 2 hours ago | |

Yes

ajross 2 hours ago |

While this is sort of laughable out of context (I mean, Steam on Linux for the last few years has run basically everything with full acceleration)...

I think what is being claimed, but not explicitly in the article, is that this is running the NVIDIA driver stack (for an ancient GeForce 8 card) directly, as opposed to emulating DirectX at the API level on top of a Vulkan driver.

chadgpt3 2 hours ago | |

Indeed. ReactOS is to the full Windows stack what Wine is to the userland Windows API.

himata4113 1 hour ago | |

I mean they reimplemented directx without vulkan, that's indeed in a league of their own. wine/proton relies on opengl/vulkan to do anything.

ddtaylor 56 minutes ago | | |

Wine has had many different DirectX backends over the decades, including one before Vulkan existed obviously.

wolvoleo 39 minutes ago | |

I wouldn't call it laughable. ReactOS was not created only to run half-life. It's just one of their many impressive achievements.

da_chicken 1 hour ago | |

> While this is sort of laughable out of context (I mean, Steam on Linux for the last few years has run basically everything with full acceleration)...

Eh. It's sort of like saying FreeDOS is laughable because DOSBox exists. I think that's missing the point.

alaskahoffman 1 hour ago |

reactos has been in development for 28 years and it can run half-life on real hardware. that is approximately how long half-life 1 itself has existed in the first place!