Hangover Alpha 2 Lets Windows x86/x64 Programs Run On ARM64, POWER 64-bit

The Wine program for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms can run on a number of different architectures, but Wine doesn't handle the emulation of running Windows x86/x64 binaries on other architectures like 64-bit ARM or PowerPC. But that's what the Wine-based Hangover is about with currently allowing those conventional Windows binaries to run on AArch64 (ARM64) and 64-bit POWER too.

Hangover started out with a focus on Windows x64 binaries on ARM64 in looking at the possible use-case of running Windows software on ARM mobile devices and more. This year with the help of Raptor Computing Systems there has been Hangover support added for IBM POWER 64-bit.

Hangover works by running Wine 64-bit on the host itself and then within a modified version of QEMU are 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Wine running. QEMU in turn is responsible for the CPU architecture implementation. Hangover has a number of thunk libraries to "glue" everything together. Basic applications can work with Hangover right now and in some cases even Direct3D, as long as the host system has working OpenGL.

Today's Hangover 0.5.15 (Alpha 2) release allows running now x86/x86_64 applications on ARM64, PPC64LE, and x86_64 but the caveat that it's highly experimental. The developers acknowledge many programs will not run at this point, but it's a start.

This Hangover release also drops its broken Android support, improved its build system, and has other improvements.

More details on Hangover via GitHub.