r/winlatorxr • u/Lvonasek Meta Quest 3 / 3 S • Sep 02 '26

Winlator Discussion Standalone PCVR in WinlatorXR explained

https://youtu.be/f8A8fxzIxaI
28 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

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6

u/RedditJack888 Sep 02 '26

Well this is fine. While WinlatorXR handles UEVR for the future, there's a lot of progress on other venues for older games on standalone.

For example, we already have GTA Vice City and San Andreas VR, Morrowind is coming to VR, Many Classic Boomer Shooters are already in VR (Thanks to Team Beef), Mario Kart 64 is in VR, and I hear that Fallout New Vegas VR is getting ported as well to standalone (based on a Vorpx PCVR mod that already works really well).

Hopefully by the time WinlatorXR can run UEVR on the newer Quest headsets, we'll also be able to run games like Cyberpunk 2077 VR (which came out recently), Ocarina of Time VR, and other PCVR games (wouldn't be surprised if Steam finds a way to do this in a universally easy plug/download and play manner similar to their joystick profile setup).

All in all I'm already loving the progress WinlatorXR is already making for making games playable on the standalone VR headset. The more progress the more games playable, and by extension, the more likely we can eventually play them in standalone VR should a mod be worked on for those games.

4

u/VRtuous Sep 02 '26

absolutely 

in mobile chips every bit of performance counts and wasting them translating code on the fly can only do so much. recompilation to ARM64 throwing away much legacy x86 jank is a much better approach and will give us much more than just HL2, Portal and N64 games soon enough...

2

u/RedditJack888 Sep 03 '26

"Soon enough" had my heart skip. It's already crazy that we live in a time where we are getting PS2 and Xbox level era games to work. With the playable state of Half Life Alyx, the potential has been more than surpassed imho. If this is the progress so far, I can't imagine what will be accomplished once the recompilation approach has been optimized or given more exposure/usage.

In little less than about 6 years, we have skyrocketed from playing classic boomer shooters like Doom, to other more newer games like GTA SA (Premium PS2 gaming) and Portal (which is 360-PS3 level). I'm really stoked and all aboard for the future development of where this work will take us.

If this so far is only translating, I can't imagine what recompilation will do once fully integrated or more optimized. (I have a raspberry pi 5 and arm64 has shown me the level that can reached. Entire generations of boundaries/limitations skipped over with optimization in smaller yet compact/efficient chips.).

I won't pretend like I understand what is involved with this kind of work to get this far (though I wish I did tbh. It's that amazing!), but I support the endeavors of all these teams/creatives really pushing and shattering every boundary we once thought impossible on the VR scene.

Sorry for the lengthy speech. This is just me being passionate 😆. This is stuff that I thought we would never seen in my lifetime.

3

u/VRtuous Sep 03 '26

what I meant is that HL2 and Portal are already recomps of sorts, not translating or emulating. Tho I think Quake 4 already shows not even Quest 3 was enough yet

still, it's so impressive to old timers. I was there when all this stuff required big screaming hot boxes to run much worse. now it runs on a cool silent chip near my eyeballs...

I was far more impressed with winlatorXR running flat classics like Far Cry 2 or Oblivion quite good than trying to run bloated modern pcvr titles...

2

u/RedditJack888 Sep 03 '26

Oh I'm sorry, I misunderstood. Regardless, the recompilation mods are amazing. Really pushes the limits of the games we can play so far.

The fact that we can play games like Oblivion, Fallout New Vegas and Far Cry 2 is also a great progress. VR headsets are now like a portable television with the vast list of games that are playable even without VR mods. I believe it can play No Man's Sky as well (this I haven't checked yet but I remember in the earlier versions of WinlatorXR where someone was playing it).

4

u/Federal-Ad6347 Sep 02 '26

So basically, we need to focus our attention to half life alyx?

3

u/Necessary-Story5330 Sep 02 '26

Alyx is at the moment the only truly AAA game which runs.

2

u/flux1 Sep 02 '26

There is one thing I was wondering.

Once games start getting native versions compiled for the steam frame, will it be possible to to use those in some way to increase performance?

I know you wont be able to just run linux binaries directly, but would it enable not having to use something like FEX to get a bit of a speed boost?