64-bit support

[VonKossa]

Hi!

Iḿ just wondering if there are any plans for native 64-bit support?
Noticed that it was a requirement of having multilib or wow64 in windows.

Problem is that now when wine finally has a somewhat working wow64 in linux the distros are lining up for getting rid of multilib. So the future does not look all that promising.

Do you consider it to be an unreachable task because of the state of the code or is because of something else?

[mefistotelis]

Related issue:
#44

What prevents architecture change is the assembly code.
To run SW Port this with 64-bit user space, it would be necessarily to either:

1. call all the 32-bit ASM functions in 32-bit mode.
2. rewrite all code to C

for 1. - that would require complex OS-specific calls, to either create additional 32-bit address space or limit the addresses used in original 64-bit address space. Also, OS kernel calls to switch the execution mode. On Linux that requires root access, on Windows that requires having the 32-bit code in a separate DLL. In general, the solution would be different for every OS.

for 2. - there are two options:
2a) do a proper rewrite until all ASM functions are gone - like it was made in KeeperFX
2b) do an automatic ASM-to-C conversion, getting hardly readable code which compiles but will need to be replaced by proper rewrite at some point - like in reMC2

I'm going towards 2a. When the code will be fully rewritten - no idea, but you may look at KeeperFX project lifespan for an estimate. The 1.0 release was the first one without calls to original code. Will the code even be fully rewritten - no idea as well. I may move to something different at any point.