QEMU MESAGL Pass-Through with Zink OpenGL to Vulkan
8An OpenGL API forwarding implementation such as QEMU MESAGL will be useless in a world without OpenGL. While this was quite unlikely in the past, the future of OpenGL becoming forgotten history and obsoleted will not be too far ahead. Fortunately, Collabora Ltd had been spearheading the efforts of OpenGL wrapping to preserve the APIs for legacy software/games. Zink OpenGL is maturing in modern Linux capable of supporting WineD3D from QEMU with MESAGL pass-through.
The VIDEO had different versions of WineD3D exercising Direct3D implementation from DirectX 6.1, 7.0, 8.1 and 9.0 in 3DMark 99, 2000, 2001SE and AquaMark3 from Windows 98 VM. A showcase of Direct3D-to-OpenGL conversion in the GUEST by WIneD3D and OpenGL-to-Vulkan conversion by Zink OpenGL on the HOST, simulating the future when modern GPUs no longer offer native OpenGL support. A testament to QEMU MESAGL versatility, despite its name, the OpenGL pass-through implementation is generic enough to work with various OpenGL implementations regardless of GPU vendors, platform/OSes or wrappers into modern graphics APIs. Thus leveraging the similar open-source & cross-platform portability of QEMU, every games that preserved in QEMU virtual machine will rest be assured to live on, be played and remembered in the foreseeable future, on Linux, Windows, macOS or any upcoming platform/OSes to where QEMU can be ported. At time of writing, Zink OpenGL is the most compliant OpenGL wrappers. It is however only available on modern Linux with up-to-date mesa graphics stacks. There is on-going efforts to build Zink OpenGL for Windows.
After all for QEMU featuring qemu-3dfx, MESAGL pass-through will remain useful with Zink OpenGL and continue serving the agenda of Game Preservation into the future.