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I don't suppose there's any way to make SWL work on Chromebook?

Morganey

LoMS Officer
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I think that this 'book can at least get me to the point where I can claim a key, but it's not immediately obvious how I'd download the game in a way that would let me run it on a Chromebook.
 
TL;DR - no.

Chromebooks don't have an operating system that can run the SWL client. The OS it uses is a flavor of AndroidOS, the same one that runs smartphones. You get "apps" from the Chrome store rather than downloading traditional applications that can run on a PC running an operating system like Windows. As far as I know SWL only runs on Windows as there is no pure client application for Mac or Linux. You can however run Windows emulators on Mac or Linux computers to play it on those systems. Your mileage may vary doing that though, as you have to support the resource usage of both the emulator and the client. Back in the day that was a problem, but more modern computers have little trouble.

The lines are beginning to blur on the technological landscape. My initial edit said that Chromebooks are basically a tablet with a keyboard. But, tablets like the Surface actually run Windows forcing the definition of a tablet to be more inclusive. "Tablet" now refers more to the form factor of the hardware rather than the software it runs. Traditionally all tablets ran an OS like Android or iOS making them oversized smartphones without cellular capability. Chromebook would have fit in the category of "tablet with a laptop body." GAH! It's all so confusing!

Dreamscape mode: Wouldn't that be something though?! I wanna fight filth on my iPhone!
 
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Android is ofc an offshoot of Linux, & afaik it is possible to run it on Linux if you jump through enough hoops, but i would try & get crappy old (cheap) 2nd hand windows laptop, as it will probably run better on that ;)
 
You can however run Windows emulators on Mac or Linux computers to play it on those systems. Your mileage may vary doing that though, as you have to support the resource usage of both the emulator and the client.
It's important to note the difference between emulation and virtualization. Most methods of running a different (or the same) OS within a host OS uses virtualization, which means it has access to all of the computer's native hardware instructions and will run almost as well as if it were running natively. Since most Windows/Linux PCs and all Macs run on Intel hardware, they're able to run in a virtualized environment natively with little to no slowdown.

Emulation, on the other hand, requires translating the native hardware instructions into a different language so that the guest OS can understand what's going on. A good example is developing for Android on a computer running macOS. Android devices run on ARM CPUs and Macs run on Intel CPUs. Since Android code won't run natively on an Intel CPU, they need to use an emulator to translate the machine code to something an ARM CPU can understand. Since this translation happens on-the-fly, there is some slowdown as the computer needs to translate every instruction before it can execute them.

In both cases, neither virtualization nor emulation is really a good solution for running games, as no software supports full GPU acceleration. Some are getting close, but aren't quite there yet. So while a virtualized OS may perform pretty well at compute tasks, anything graphics-intensive is going to fail, hard.

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I bow before your munificent expertise, Symmetric! I was force to retire from the IT world 9 years ago because of multiple sclerosis and it is always refreshing to know that my skills aren't rusty event though this old body is unwilling to go back to work. You are of course correct about the differences between emulation and virtualization, though I often lumped them together when describing the concept of running one OS on top of another. Extra bonus points for the excellent gif. :D
 
IT buddies! Hope I didn't seem like I was trying to correct you as you're absolutely right about the two terms being used interchangeably.

I was bored at work and we were talking about VMs at the time so my brain just felt like dumping that info somewhere. :p

Anyways - no SWL on Chromebooks. :(
 
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