/jp/ - Otaku Culture

I was wondering about the best way to run Japanese Windows-only software on Unix-like operating systems. The rest of the 2D world is enjoyable with no trouble (mpv for video, any music player for music, any torrent client for torrenting...), but if you want to run many games and visual novels you need Windows.

All the integer Touhou games work fine in Wine, aside from a few font issues in EoSD (that were present in the original game anyway, the new patch guys are trying to fix it).
You can play NScripter games (Higurashi, Tsukihime, Narcissu) with ONScripter.
You can play RealLive games (Kanon, Air, Clannad) with rlvm.
You can play some old games with ViLE, or through your browser at http://tss.asenheim.org..
For some reason there's no KiriKiri/KAG interpreter for Linux, even though it's open-source and one of the most popular engines. Still, Wine runs most KiriKiri games just fine. Also, this page claims to be able to convert KAG3 games to HTML5: http://tyrano.jp..

Howeverm, Wine simply isn't good enough and a lot of software isn't supported, so I think full Windows virtualization is needed. Therefore, the BSDs are sadly discarded since you can't virtualize Windows on them.

Graphics acceleration on virtual machines is a tricky subject. The best way to proceed seems to be VGA passthrough, which requires a dedicated GPU for the virtual machine along with hardware that supports it. Using KVM seems to be the best method, and it delivers almost bare metal performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FthrTZtlGQ / http://grids.ucs.indiana.edu/ptliupages/publications/Cloud_2014.pdf . Recently, NVIDIA changed its drivers to cripple its non-Quadro cards if it detects they're being run on a VM, there are workarounds but I think it's better to pass an AMD card.

What's your experience with Touhou, visual novels, etc. on Linux? Did you manage just fine with Wine or a plain VirtualBox host or did you have to dual boot?

>>12995059
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