Running executable CGI on NGINX (NOT PHP!)

Question

I have an older web application that uses .cgi script files. These are compiled ELF binaries, directly executable on the system.

I have been able to get these running with a pretty basic Apache configuration on my Windows machine and also using the lighttpd-mod-cgi package on an embedded linux system (where I would like to run it).

I already had NGINX running on the latter, and I was hoping to be able to utilize just NGINX without installing a separate web-server like lighttpd.

I'm very much at a loss here partly because I admittedly don't have a lot of experience with CGI scripts at all. I understand that CGI is a "protocol" and not a language, but every single search I try leads me to results about configuring FastCGI or spawn-fcgi and they all discuss configuring and running PHP scripts.

These are not PHP scripts, they are executables and I would think that I didn't need a separate interpreter.

What is the most straight forward way to configure NGINX to host these CGI files?

I have tried all the above, but am really getting nowhere. I can keep the lighttpd install if any additional components I need for NGINX are likely to be as resource intensive. I just want to know for certain if this is a futile effort or if NGINX has the ability to run executable CGI scripts without additional components.