A guide to play VN (and other Windows games) on Mac using Wine

[GLM4475]

I'll start the guide with a short introduction of Wine     

 

   Windows and Mac have been rival for quite some time. Until now, people are still arguing which one is better, simpler, faster, and other things. Seeing how different the architecture of the two, many folks have tried to make files and/or programs unique to one OS to be able to use on the other. One of the most commonly used method to do this is by emulating one OS on another. Programs like Virtual Box and VMware serves this purpose nicely. Unfortunately, emulating an OS requires a quite great number of RAM and the execution process is still slower than execution of the same code by the processor for which the code was compiled.

 

   Then some people create a free and open source compatibility layer software that aims to allow applications designed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems, namely Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator). The phrase "wine is not an emulator" is a reference to the fact that no processor code execution emulation occurs when running a Windows application under Wine.  In Wine, the Windows application's compiled x86 code runs at full native speed on the computer's x86 processor, just as it does when running under Windows. Windows system services are also supplied by Wine, in the form of wineserver. WIne works by duplicating functions of Windows by providing alternative implementations of the DLLs that Windows programs call, and a process to substitute for the Windows NT kernel.

 

   The Wine project originally released Wine under the same MIT license as the X Window System, but owing to concern about proprietary versions of Wine not contributing their changes back to the core project, work as of March 2002 has used the LGPL for its licensing. The project has proven time-consuming and difficult for the developers, mostly because of incomplete and incorrect documentations of the Windows API. While Microsoft extensively documents most Win32 functions, some areas such as file formats and protocols have no publicly available specification from Microsoft. Microsoft Windows also includes undocumented low-level functions, undocumented behavior and obscure bugs that Wine must duplicate precisely in order to allow some applications to work properly. Consequently, the Wine team has reverse-engineered many function calls and file formats in such areas as thunking.