←back to thread

Box64 and RISC-V in 2024: What It Takes to Run the Witcher 3 on RISC-V

(box86.org)
366 points pabs3 | 1 comments | 27 Aug 24 04:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | source
Show context
Manfred ◴[27 Aug 24 08:31 UTC] No.41365540[source]▶
> At least in the context of x86 emulation, among all 3 architectures we support, RISC-V is the least expressive one.

RISC was explained to me as a reduced instruction set computer in computer science history classes, but I see a lot of articles and proposed new RISC-V profiles about "we just need a few more instructions to get feature parity".

I understand that RISC-V is just a convenient alternative to other platforms for most people, but does this also mean the RISC dream is dead?

replies(7): >>41365583 #>>41365644 #>>41365687 #>>41365974 #>>41366364 #>>41370373 #>>41370588 #
1. WhyNotHugo ◴[27 Aug 24 10:16 UTC] No.41365974[source]▶
In this particular context, they're trying to run code compiled for x86_64 on RISCV5. The need from "we just need a few more instructions to get feature parity" comes from trying to run code that is already compiled for an architecture with all those extra instructions.

In theory, if you compiled the original _source_ code for RISC, you'd get an entirely binary and wouldn't need those specific instructions.

In practice, I doubt anyone is going to actually compile these games for RISCV5.