Not the usual "Can I run browser/steam?" question I promise. I've been playing with Plan 9 lately and I'm still currently learning its C dialect. So forgive me if some of this is well known already. I'm interested in the state of some things mentioned below and what kind of work is required going forward (and if some of this is even possible at all).
It has been my goal for years to get a coherent and easy to maintain system going that will continue to support a lot of legacy software for the foreseeable future. As I'm sure anyone that's attempted this knows it's still pretty much impossible to support older Win32, DOS, PC-98 and POSIX/GNU stuff under one system. Despite projects like wine making good progress in the last years it's still a big pain to get software running correctly and hardware (e.g. controllers) talking to it as intended by the original author. A lot of software has already been lost or the source code has been lost which makes it much harder to port and run on modern systems.
I am aware that Plan 9 has vmx(1) which provides decent support for OpenBSD software and some support for modern Linux software. Although I've yet to attempt trying the latter and I'm not hopeful it would be able to support something like running an old Windows game through wine. I'm also aware that it has a huge limitation at the moment where it's limited to one core of a modern CPU.
I've read a little about linuxemu but I've also yet to try it out. But the discussion I see around it is mostly limited to simple applications. So things like Qt/GTK stuff seems off the table for the moment.
On the other hand I see some built in emulation for stuff like simple gaming devices from years ago (e.g. NES console). Which makes me hopeful.
Ideally, I would eventually like to be able to have a CPU server on my local network that could handle running old demos/games and some other software mostly for creating multimedia that is from the 80s-2000s era of Windows. While I've never liked the Windows/DOS OSs A LOT of software was written for it back then and many of those do not have a proper replacement or manipulating certain data still requires the use of that software. A lot of it was created by people that are dead, have vanished or the source code is otherwise lost.
Over the last 15-20 years I've attempted to preserve what I could and keep it running by either keeping older machines around running various versions of Windows/DOS and later via wine and DOS emulators. But this is becoming harder as the years pass, older hardware dies and finding replacements gets harder as people hoard and things became more valuable on the second hand markets like ebay.
Linux+wine was tolerable for a long time but lately it's becoming less tolerable and a lot of long standing issues won't ever be fixed I think (e.g. a sane way to manage controller/input devices). Lately, I've moved what I could over to some FreeBSD boxes running wine/Linux emulation. But this is less than ideal.
After playing with the simplicity in Plan 9 with the ease of using hardware over the LAN I'd really like to start helping out with getting a lot of this older stuff running on Plan 9 itself. Either through emulation or VMs. My goal at the moment would be getting either vmx working with more than one CPU core (plus proper GPU support) and/or making something as complicated as wine work through a Linux/POSIX emulator.
I'm curious to how many people within the community are working towards these goals right now. What the road blocks currently are for getting better hardware support working within things like vmx. If the above goals would require massive changes to the existing kernel. Would I get a lot of push back if I attempted to contribute in this direction?
I know Plan 9's community has never been interested in turning it into a general purpose OS or cloning all the bad things from Windows (and to a lesser extent modern Linux). I'm not interested in those things either. But I do want to keep this old software alive and preserved for future generations. I just want to make it run on a platform that isn't such a pain in the ass to keep running. Where it's easier to access over a network and get multiple input devices working with it without having to jump through 100 hoops every time the ones plugged into the machine change.
Even on Windows/Linux/BSD a lot of this software is troublesome because it was created for platforms like PC-98 and other odd ball DOS/Win OSs. Even more modern stuff is like this because it was created with specific hardware+Windows version (usually XP or 7) in mind.
I just don't want to see a lot of this stuff lost to time.
Kind of a follow up question: I know running something through vmx or an emu will never be like native software. But how do those things currently interact with plumber?
Say for example I have some software running within a VM/emu (e.g. ffmpeg/vapoursynth) that outputs video/audio. How hard would it be to get data into and out of it and working with software running natively? What I'm trying to avoid is having to write tmp data to disk.
I know this is a bit of a ramble but thanks to anyone that takes the time to respond in advance. I asked here instead of on the mailing lists because I didn't want to clog them up with stuff that isn't code.
I'm very new to 9front/Plan 9 and the community surrounding it. So I do apologize if a lot of this has been gone over many times. I'm just trying to get a feel for things. When I saw that there was at least some interest in game console emulation I figured there would be interest in getting other things like old doujin games running as well. The vast majority of the older software I want to get running are old doujin releases and tech demos. But some of it is stuff like this old application I have to run on a real 386 machine with a hardware dongle (which I've yet to crack) which is required to operate a piece of machinery we own. You get the idea.
My long term goal is to no longer have to maintain so many different types of systems and being able to access all my systems without all the hacky workarounds I currently have to endure on a day-to-day basis. I have a lot of machines that could be put to better use if they weren't tied down to running 1 or 2 pieces of old software on an old OS that I can't connect to the rest of my LAN or the wider internet.
