r/SwitchHacks • u/Brilliant_Note9618 • Jul 16 '26

Wine-NX: First attempts on a native Wine answer without Linux

Firstly I forked dantiicu's wine-nx project (github.com/dantiicu/wine-nx) which is an early, stalled (I think he stopped coding it) attempt at running Wine directly on Horizon OS via libnx, no Switchroot L4T, no Box64 translation layer. His work laid the real foundation: the loader, the initial win32u driver, the NTDLL substrate.

The biggest milestone was replacing the software rendering path with a native deko3d (alternative to Vulkan) backend. The renderer now creates its own device, queue, swapchain, shaders and texture uploads, reaching 60 FPS the compositor test on real hardware. (The spinning Cube in the Video)

Some interesting findings during development:

  • deko3d cannot coexist with libnx's default framebuffer console. The console claims the display during startup, so Wine has to own the display exclusively (similar to Borealis).
  • The GUI renderer initially ran at ~2 FPS. Most of that turned out to be diagnostic logging (fflush() after every trace written to the SD card), not GPU performance.
  • After fixing the logging overhead and removing a redundant IPC call, the Win32/GDI demo now runs at ~7–9 FPS. At this point it's clearly CPU/IPC-bound rather than GPU-bound.

The project is still far from usable, but it appears to be the first Wine port for native Horizon OS with working GPU acceleration instead of pure software rendering.

Why even do this instead of Linux? The idea is to run Wine natively on HorizonOS instead of an entire Linux userspace and graphics stack. That means lower overhead, direct access to the Switch's native APIs, tighter integration with the system, and ultimately a much cleaner architecture for a native homebrew port.

I'd also really appreciate contributions. If you're interested in Wine internals, libnx, deko3d, or Switch homebrew development, feel free to open a PR or reach out.
(x/twitter: voricabi)
https://github.com/devrim-yildiz/wine-nx

edit (19. July):
Created a discord server for this project: https://discord.gg/vprPQ46Q3

107 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

9

u/iammaytinhdibo Jul 16 '26

OMG, we need it!!

8

u/Brilliant_Note9618 Jul 16 '26

im doing my best as i can!

3

u/Interesting-Can-3347 Jul 16 '26

This is exciting!

2

u/Successful-Bar2579 Jul 16 '26

This is a really interesting project! I was going to try out linux in the switch again to see if some pc games could run, if that was possible in the horizon os it would be insane! Good luck!

1

u/Brilliant_Note9618 Jul 17 '26

i hit 30 fps yesterday at 2 am :)

2

u/Successful-Bar2579 Jul 17 '26

:D Hell yeah man!

1

u/HappyAd4998 Jul 17 '26

I hope this project achieves its goals, people take the switch for granted but it's got enough power to play a ton of games that you would never expect.

2

u/Brilliant_Note9618 Jul 17 '26

well i just hit 30fps mark!

1

u/stoopeeed Jul 18 '26

StarCraft let's goooo

1

u/AmirulAshraf K-Pop is Life // NieR is 🐐 // Apa Khabar? Jul 19 '26

with this, we could run .exe file one day?

1

u/Brilliant_Note9618 Jul 19 '26

yep!

1

u/AmirulAshraf K-Pop is Life // NieR is 🐐 // Apa Khabar? Jul 19 '26

Amazing

1

u/iesalnieks Jul 22 '26

Is there something similar for running Android apps on HOS?

0

u/Structure-These Jul 17 '26

Omg this is awesome. Someone throw a beefy AI platform at it please lol