What is the best way to run NESmaker on Linux?

I've recently made the leap from Windows 10 to Linux Mint, and so far, I am really in heaven... except for NESmaker and Game Maker Studio 2. These are the two only things I would need some kind of Wine profile/light virtual machine for.

So I've been reading other posts, and I understand that, as of now, there is neither native Linux support nor a good Wine profile. ReactOS, which would be the best alternative since it's fairly quick and lightweight has been reported not to work either. I've set a Windows 10 virtual machine, but even after following this guide to the letter, I still have poor performance. We're talking ding.wav being choppy here. So what is the oldest Windows version I can use through a virtual machine in order to run NESmaker? Would Windows 98 work? Maybe that's a stupid question, but I still want it addressed, so that others can benefit from the information.

So, with my limited knowledge of Linux so far, I can already see that we would need to know exactly what .dlls and other Windows components NESmaker uses. Can any of the developers help us with that?

Personally, I use a Windows7 virtual machine (on my Macbook) for NESMaker. It's work quite well.

dale_coop said:

Personally, I use a Windows7 virtual machine (on my Macbook) for NESMaker. It's work quite well.

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I agree with Dale.

You can use a VM (for Linux I recommend Virtual Box) and run it should run fine. NESMaker uses very little resources.

n8bit said:

dale_coop said:

Personally, I use a Windows7 virtual machine (on my Macbook) for NESMaker. It's work quite well.

Click to expand...

I agree with Dale.

You can use a VM (for Linux I recommend Virtual Box) and run it should run fine. NESMaker uses very little resources.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure you read my post properly. I also "agree with Dale", as I am already using a virtual machine (Virtual Box) running Windows 10, but it is painfully slow (not NESmaler, but the OS itself).

So my question remain: what is the earliest version of Windows that is compatible with NESmaker? An old version would potentially run faster. Dale mentions Windows 7, but since he uses a Mac, and that according to what I found, Windows 10 should run faster that Windows 7, I'm not sure it would improve the situation. Moreover, I do not have access to a Windows 7 licence key or software. Windows 10 can run without a key for a while before a simple "watermark" reminds you to register.

Hmm... my apologies. I am curious as to how much RAM your system has and how much you have allocated to your VM. Windows 10 does run faster but tends to have more initial install bloat vs. Win7. Aside from allocating more RAM to your VM you could also look at trimming down your Win10 install.

There are a lot of resources out there to help guide you in trimming down Win10, this might help:

https://www.howtogeek.com/224798/how-to-uninstall-windows-10s-built-in-apps-and-how-to-reinstall-them/

n8bit said:

Hmm... my apologies. I am curious as to how much RAM your system has and how much you have allocated to your VM. Windows 10 does run faster but tends to have more initial install bloat vs. Win7. Aside from allocating more RAM to your VM you could also look at trimming down your Win10 install.

There are a lot of resources out there to help guide you in trimming down Win10, this might help:

https://www.howtogeek.com/224798/how-to-uninstall-windows-10s-built-in-apps-and-how-to-reinstall-them/

Click to expand...

I followed this guidehttps://youtu.be/2oO9CeZXjTY. The only thing I think is not good in the guide is that he recommends choosing "dynamically allocated" for the hard disk, but after reading around, it seems like this can slow down the virtual machine, especially if your hard drive is an HDD, not SSD. I will thus try creating a new Windows 10 virtual machine and choose "Fixed size". Hopefully, that will help.

As for bloatware... yep, there's a lot of crap coming pre-installed with Windows 10. That's why I used this: https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater Very effective, and oh so satisfying!

Any experience with this?
I use a linux mint computer which is a bit old. I will buy the nesmaker and want to make sure i will be able to use it properly. maybe installing windows 7 will be better for my old computer?

If you can run windows 7 or 10 well in Virtual Box, NESmaker will also run well. As for me, I can't make Windows 10 run at an acceptable speed in Virtual Box, so I just gave up on NESmaker altogether.