Windows VSTs with ARM Linux

[tresf]

This is a work in progress to document the viability of Windows 64-bit VSTs on ARM64 Linux

• Ubuntu 24.04 ARM64
• tresf/aarch64-vst branch
• Hangover wine (steps below)

What works:

• 64-bit Windows VST2 instruments try to start as can be observed by the console

  Lv2 plugin SUMMARY: 2 of 12  loaded in 2 msecs.
  For details about not loaded plugins, please set
    environment variable "LMMS_LV2_DEBUG" to nonempty.
  
  Starting detached.  <--- VST tries to load
  

What doesn't work:

• LMMS doesn't recognize the VST loading and gives up
• VST instrument UI never appears
• VST effects can be added and also show "Starting detached" but do not appear to start properly and do not modify the sound.

Limitations:

• Due to the unavailability of 32-bit wine development libraries on ARM64, compiling RemoteVstPlugin32 is not possible at this time, which prevents 32-bit VSTs from trying to start.

Hangover wine steps:

# Remove Ubuntu provided wine packages
sudo apt-get remove fonts-wine libcapi20-3t64 libgettextpo0 libodbc2 libosmesa6 libwine libwine-dev libz-mingw-w64 wine wine64 wine64-tools

# Download and extract hangover (Ubuntu 24.04 provided as an example)
wget https://github.com/AndreRH/hangover/releases/download/hangover-10.0-rc6/hangover_10.0-rc6_ubuntu2404_noble_arm64.tar
tar -xvf hangover*.tar

# Install all hangover packages
sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/hangover_10.0-rc6_ubuntu2404_noble_arm64/*.deb

Since hangover is able to successfully start other 32-bit and 64-bit Intel-based apps (e.g. notepad++), I'd expect this to work in some capacity. Any help is appreciated.