Wine is a free and open source application that allows users to run Windows software on other operating systems. Wine is always under heavy development with the team preparing one release every 2 weeks. Yesterday, the founder and current leader of the project Alexandre Julliard, announced the availability of version 1.5.6, that brings some important additions and fixes.
What’s new in this release:
– Automatic installation of the Mono add-on package.
– Control panel applet for joysticks.
– Device bitmap rendering now done through the DIB engine.
– Support for video rendering through DirectX (VMR-9).
– First steps towards a D3D shader compiler.
– Build fixes for DragonFly BSD.
– Various bug fixes.
The D3D Shader compiler is wonderful news, but I think we’ll have to wait some time before we see any real functionality. VMR-9 is a filter bundled inside Directx9 that allows the transformation of video images using the Direct3D pixel shaders. It is only natural for Wine to be a behind Windows that uses a newer filter for some years now.
Some of the specific applications bugs fixed include:
– Adobe Flash Player 9 and 10: movies and images are messed up
– The Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria doesn’t start
– Sound does not work in Big Fish Games when acceleration is set to full
– Medieval Total War Gold DVD Italian – Unload the debugger error
– Rise of Nations Gold Edition Nuclear Blast Effect Looks Awful
– Machinarium window does not show any contents and hangs desktop
– Office Professional Plus 2010 install fails without machine.config file
– EVE Online crashes on attempt to move window
– Sanitarium crashes/hangs frequently with OpenGL renderer
