DirectX emulation is the way Linux gamers are running Windows-only games on Linux OSes, thanks to tools such as DXVK. But up until now, DXVK has only supported DirectX 8 and newer. That is now changing; an independent developer has taken up the work of creating their own DirectX 7-to-Vulkan emulation tool, dubbed D7VK (via Phoronix).
D7VK is a spin-off of DXVK, which uses DXVK's DirectX 9 emulation backend and Wine's DDRAW implementation (for Linux, specifically) to create a "minimal d3d7-on-d3d9" implementation. This makes D7VK a two-stage translation layer that translates DX7 calls to DX9 calls, then translates those DX9 calls to Vulkan.
