>Interesting. As you'll recall, prior to MS's purchase Fox was to be a cross-platform tool with Unix and Mac early versions even released. The scx still is a good model for this plan, but ever-increasing Windows reliance now forces emulation on other OS. Perhaps one day, somebody will "discover" (quote marks used for your enjoyment) the advantages of a cross platform tool that doesn't require Rube Goldberg piecings together, just a 4GL with native data handling and FPW-style screens that encapsulate most of the UI complexity.

The wine is a nice trick because it's not an emulator (wine is no emulator - hence the name), it's a bluffer. Any system call that an app makes is intercepted by wine's code which then either serves the request by handwritten code which returns the appropriate result or is a wrapper around a native function. So, for example, path related functions and dialogs are handcoded and functionally emulate those of windows (but using linux fonts), while anything related to graphics probably calls some native graphics library. I've noticed that even text editing behaves differently - ctrl+left/right arrow doesn't necessarily jump to the beginning of the next word. It jumps to the end of current word, then to the end of the next etc, which is different from what I remember from W7.
Also, filesystem is emulated - there's a set of folders which pretends to be the C drive, and for the rest you can just set (in a .conf file) the folders you want to use as other drives. Also, there's a registry, but it's minimal and, ah, it's a plain text file. And wine now also incorporates DosBox, so if it's FPD you want, it also works.