New Emulator Lets Some x86-64 Games Run on RISC-V Dev Board

Wow, I didn't even realize there any consumer-grade (or dev-grade I guess) RISC-V boards available. Really cool news!

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary The latest version of Box64, a popular x86_64 emulator for Linux running on architectures like ARM/AArch64 and RISC-V, introduces significant performance improvements, making possible gaming on RISC-V-based platforms such as the Vision Five 2 board, reports Phoronix.

This facilitates faster operations of x86_64 Linux software on RISC-V 64-bit system and makes simplistic games, such as Stardew Valley, playable on Vision Five 2-based devices.

Additionally, the new version introduces several fixes for Steam, enhanced multi-threading capabilities, and broader improvements for emulation across various CPU architectures.

While titles like Stardew Valley can hardly attract avid gamers, the Vision Five 2 is not exactly designed to run games (even though it has an OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.2-capable integrated GPU), so running a game is already a kind of a breakthrough for this product.

The motherboard is aimed at software developers and is based in the quad-core StarFive JH7110 SoC with SiFive U74 RV64GC cores running at 1.50 GHz and Imagination's  BXE-4-32 GPU.

The Box64 version 0.2.4 has refined its compatibility with several modifications, which includes better handling of ELF files, added wrapped libraries and functions, expanded opcode functionalities, and preliminary WoW64 support for 32-bit operations in Wine.

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As someone out of the loop on modern RISC, what is the benefit of RISC versus x86/64?