Others disagreed, though. Joshua Ashton argued that the problem is more widespread: ““It’s not just about God of War specifically. There are many old titles that will never, ever, get updated to fix this problem. These titles worked perfectly fine and were performant before.””

The problem is that this sort of thing works well with open-source software, where the stuff can always be fixed, but isn’t going to do much of anything with closed-source software like old Windows games.

It might be possible to introduce some sort of fancy code-mangling stuff to WINE that can in-memory modify binaries doing this. Like, I’m kind of guessing that God of War most likely isn’t trying to synchronize access with anything other than its own threads, so it doesn’t actually require atomicity as regards anything else on the system. Maybe it’s possible to patch the code in question to jump out to some WINE code that acquires a mutex and then does the memory modification/access.