1 The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 1.2 is
4 This release represents two years of development effort and over
5 23,000 changes. The main highlights are the support for 64-bit
6 applications, and the new graphics based on the Tango standard.
8 It also contains a lot of improvements across the board, and over
9 3,000 bug fixes. See the release notes below for a summary of the
12 The source is available from the following locations:
14 http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/system/emulators/wine/wine-1.2.tar.bz2
15 http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.2.tar.bz2
17 Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
19 http://www.winehq.org/download
21 You will find documentation on http://www.winehq.org/documentation
23 You can also get the current source directly from the git
24 repository. Check http://www.winehq.org/git for details.
26 Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
27 AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
29 ----------------------------------------------------------------
31 What's new in Wine 1.2
32 ======================
34 *** Core functionality
36 - Loading and running 64-bit Windows applications is now supported on
37 x86-64 processors (only on Linux at this point).
39 - There are now two flavors of Wine prefixes, 32-bit and
40 64-bit. 32-bit prefixes only support 32-bit applications, while
41 64-bit prefixes support both 32-bit and 64-bit applications. The
42 prefix flavor is set at prefix creation time and cannot be changed
43 afterwards, since all the files and registry entries are in
44 different locations. Backwards compatibility is ensured by
45 considering all prefixes created with older Wine versions to be
48 - WoW64 file system redirection is supported now. When running a
49 32-bit application in a 64-bit prefix, accesses to the
50 window/system32 directory are automatically redirected to
53 - WoW64 registry redirection is now supported in 64-bit prefixes. This
54 allows both 32-bit and 64-bit applications to set platform-specific
55 registry keys without stepping on each other.
57 - All the 16-bit support code has been moved to a set of independent
58 16-bit modules. No 16-bit code is loaded or initialized when running
59 a standard Win32 application, unless it starts making 16-bit calls.
61 - The mount manager now reports the actual UUID for disk devices that
62 support it instead of a hard-coded one.
64 - Symbolic links are now supported in the registry.
66 - The C runtime libraries msvcr80, msvcr90 and msvcr100 used by recent
67 Visual C++ versions are now partially implemented.
69 - Some functions now use a Microsoft-compatible function prologue when
70 building with a recent enough gcc. This allows Steam overlays to
76 - There are new icons for all the built-in applications, as well as
77 for the standard toolbars and images. The icons are based on the
78 Tango set for a nicer integration with the native Unix desktop look.
80 - Animated cursors can now be loaded, though only the first frame of
81 the animation is used as a static cursor.
83 - The mouse cursor is now updated correctly in applications that
84 create windows from different threads, like Internet Explorer.
86 - The standard print and page setup dialogs are working much better
89 - There is now an application wizard control panel to manage installed
92 - Rendering of bi-directional text is now supported reasonably
93 well. There is also some support for Arabic text shaping.
95 - Many features of the RichEdit control are improved, particularly
96 support for tables, URL detection, cursor positioning, scrollbar
97 management, and support for windowless controls.
99 - Many common controls work better now, particularly the listview,
100 calendar and tab controls.
102 - There is now a partial implementation of the Microsoft Text Services
103 framework, which provides better input method support in modern
106 - There is now a proper user interface for importing, exporting and
107 managing cryptographic keys and certificates.
109 - Wine is now fully translated to French, German, Dutch, Italian,
110 Portuguese, Romanian, Polish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, and Korean. It
111 has partial translations for another twenty languages.
114 *** Desktop integration
116 - The XDG standard for application startup notification is now
119 - The NET_WORKAREA property is now supported to let applications take
120 into account the size of the Unix desktop task bars.
122 - File associations created by a Windows applications are now
123 registered with the Unix desktop.
125 - Application icons are now set with the NET_WM_ICON hint, which
126 enables alpha channel transparency under window managers that
129 - Maximizing a window from the Unix window manager is now detected and
130 the state is correctly reflected on the Windows application side.
132 - The XDG desktop screen saver is now launched when a Windows
133 application makes a request to start the screen saver.
135 - Start Menu entries are now properly removed when an application is
138 - Copying and pasting images between Windows and Unix applications
139 works more reliably now, and more image formats are supported.
141 - Launching an external Unix Web browser from a Windows application
144 - MSI files are now associated with Wine to enable launching them
145 directly from the desktop.
147 - The virtual desktop window now switches to full-screen mode when its
148 size matches that of the screen.
150 - The strange window management behavior used by Delphi-generated
151 applications is better supported now.
156 - Subpixel font rendering is now supported, which greatly improves
157 text appearance on LCD screens. The subpixel configuration is
158 derived from the system fontconfig and Xft settings.
160 - Icons with alpha channels are now properly blended in, for a much
163 - Image lists now properly store the alpha channel of images and use
164 it when displaying them.
166 - The windowscodecs dll has been added, with codecs for the JPEG, GIF,
167 PNG, BMP, ICO, and TIFF image formats.
169 - Many functions are now implemented in GDIPlus. The gdiplus dll is
170 now considered good enough to load the built-in version by default.
172 - Overlays are now supported in DirectDraw.
174 - Many more capabilities are now supported in the SANE scanner
175 backend. This improves scanning support in Acrobat.
180 - The openal32 dll is now implemented, as a wrapper around the Unix
183 - There is now an initial implementation of the mmdevapi dll (part of
184 the new Vista sound architecture), using OpenAL for sound I/O.
186 - The msgsm32.acm GSM codec is now supported.
188 - The ALSA sound driver now works better with PulseAudio's ALSA
191 - Digital playback of audio CDs is now supported.
194 *** Internet and networking
196 - The HTTP protocol implementation has seen many improvements, in
197 particular better handling of proxies and redirects, better cookie
198 management, support for gzip encoding, fixes for chunked transfer
199 mode, support for IPv6 addresses, and better certificate validation
200 on secure connections.
202 - The Gecko HTML engine has been updated to a more recent upstream
203 version. Many more HTML objects are now implemented.
205 - The RPC layer now properly supports server-side authentication and
206 impersonation. The COM marshalling/unmarshalling is also more
207 compatible. RPC is now supported over the HTTP protocol too.
209 - There is now an essentially complete implementation of the
212 - The IRDA network protocol is now supported by the socket layer.
214 - The inetmib1 dll is now implemented, with support for the standard
217 - The inetcomm dll now implements the POP3 and SMTP protocols, as well
218 as better MIME support.
220 - Extended mail providers are now better supported, particularly the
221 native Outlook provider. Mail attachments are also supported now.
223 - Many undocumented functions in the shlwapi dll have been implemented
224 for improved Internet Explorer support.
229 - FBOs are now used by default for off-screen rendering in Direct3D.
231 - Backbuffers larger/smaller than their associated window are now
234 - A large portion of the d3dx9 dlls is now implemented, most notably
235 the shader assembler, .x file support, functions for fonts, general
236 3D math, mesh handling, and sprites. A start has been made with the
237 texture and effect functions.
239 - Fog handling has improved a lot.
241 - Various YUV texture formats are now supported.
243 - wined3d contexts are now managed per-thread, and play nice both with
244 other wined3d instances and opengl32 GL contexts. Contexts are
245 checked for validity before being used (e.g. if the associated
246 window is destroyed.)
248 - Point sprite handling has improved a lot.
250 - The shader source is now dumped on GLSL compile/link failures. This
251 is mostly to help driver developers, like Mesa, with investigating
252 GLSL bugs triggered by Wine.
254 - The graphics card detection code is improved, and many more graphics
255 cards are now recognized.
257 - User clip planes are now supported in shaders. This allows proper
258 water reflections in Half-Life 2.
260 - There is now an initial implementation of Direct3D 10, including the
261 dxgi, d3d10core and d3d10 dlls. Most of the work so far has gone
262 into parsing d3d10 effects and SM4 shaders.
264 - Shadow samplers are now properly supported. This fixes shadows in
267 - There is now a shader based implementation of D3D fixed function
268 fragment processing. This avoids some limitations of the previous
269 OpenGL fixed function based approach.
271 - Partial updates of surfaces with compressed formats are now properly
274 - Many new OpenGL extensions are now supported. These include:
276 - EXT_provoking_vertex/ARB_provoking_vertex. This allows the
277 correct vertex color to be used when flat shading is enabled, and
278 helps Civilization IV in particular.
280 - EXT_vertex_array_bgra/ARB_vertex_array_bgra. This allows for more
281 efficient handling of BGRA (D3DCOLOR) data in the fixed function
284 - EXT_draw_buffers2. This enables independent color write masks
285 when multiple (simultaneous) render targets are in use.
287 - Various nVidia extensions to ARB vertex/fragment programs. These
288 allow SM3 support with the ARB vertex/fragment program shader
291 - EXT_texture_compression_rgtc. This adds support for the ATI2N
292 (also known as 3Dc) compressed texture format.
294 - ARB_texture_rg. This allows for more efficient support of the
295 R16F, G16R16F, R32F and G32R32F texture formats.
297 - ARB_framebuffer_object. This is mostly the same as the existing
298 support for EXT_framebuffer_object, but improves rendering with a
299 depth/stencil buffer larger than the color buffer(s). It helps
300 (among others) Splinter Cell,
302 - ARB_sync. This adds support for multi-threaded / cross GL context
303 event queries used by Dragon Age: Origins.
305 - ARB_half_float_vertex. This adds support for 16-bit floating
306 point vertex formats on cards that don't already support
307 NV_half_float. It helps Supreme Commander.
309 - There is now a general framework for supporting variations/quirks in
313 *** Built-in applications
315 - The Wine debugger now displays a crash dialog to let the user know
316 that a crash happened before dumping the backtrace information.
318 - The Wine debugger now uses the Dwarf exception unwinding data for
319 more reliable backtraces.
321 - The file dialogs in built-in applications are now resizable.
323 - Regedit can now import from and export to files in Unicode format.
325 - Wineboot now displays a dialog while creating or updating the prefix
326 directory to let the user know that something is happening, since
327 the update can take some time, particularly with 64-bit prefixes.
329 - Text replacement is now implemented in Notepad.
331 - The print preview feature in Wordpad now works much better.
333 - Navigation in help files now works better in Winhelp. Many graphical
334 glitches have also been fixed.
336 - The Winecfg dialogs have been tweaked so that the application is
337 usable in a 640x480 desktop. The About panel has been redesigned
338 with better graphics.
340 - The command-line parser in cmd.exe is more compatible now, which
341 should enable more Windows batch files to execute correctly. There
342 is also a regression test suite for it.
344 - Rpcss now implements a proper RPC endpoint mapper.
347 *** Build environment
349 - The Wine IDL compiler can now generate correct code for all the
350 standard IDL files, including proper exception handling. A large
351 number of COM proxies and servers are now automatically generated
352 from their IDL definitions.
354 - The fake dll placeholders are now built at compile time, instead of
355 being generated every time a Wine prefix is created. This makes it
356 possible to install a placeholder for every supported dll, which
357 should avoid many failures in installers that check dll versions.
359 - configure now supports the --disable-tests option to prevent
360 building the test suite. This allows for faster compile times,
361 particularly when bisecting a regression.
363 - The cross-compiled tests are now built against the Wine import
364 libraries instead of the Mingw ones. The latter are not compatible
365 enough for our needs.
367 - winegcc now handles resource files just like normal object files and
368 links them into the final binary without requiring special build
371 - winebuild and winegcc now fully support Solaris.
373 - Wine now builds properly on Cygwin, though some of the resulting
374 binaries do not work correctly.
376 - Makefiles are now created as needed during the build process,
377 instead of being all created together at configure time. This makes
378 it unnecessary to run 'make depend' in most cases.
380 - winemaker now has better support for Visual C++ project files.
385 - The OLE storage implementation now supports transacted storage, with
386 proper commits and rollbacks. This enables support for Microsoft
387 Office documents containing macros.
389 - The MSI installer now supports patches, which enables the
390 installation of service packs for many applications. Many more MSI
391 standard actions are also supported now.
393 - The rsaenh dll now supports the SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512
394 encryption algorithms, as well as CALG_SSL3_SHAMD5 hashing.
396 - OLE database objects are now implemented, which fixes the clipart
397 functionality in Microsoft Office 2007.
399 - Copying and pasting OLE objects across applications works better now.
401 - Support for cryptographic signatures and certificates is improved,
402 including support for certificate trust lists.
404 - The Task Scheduler service is now implemented.
409 - Bitmap stretching and alpha blending is now done through Xrender
410 when possible, which avoids a time-consuming round-trip of the
411 bitmap bits from the X server.
413 - Startup time for MSI installers that contain a large amount of
414 strings is much improved.
416 - Setting the processor affinity for threads or processes is now
417 supported, which improves multi-core performance for applications
418 that take advantage of it.
420 - Loading large symbol tables in the Wine debugger is much faster
423 - FBO handling has improved significantly. Recently used FBO
424 configurations are now cached, which is a major performance
427 - Loading shader constants is more efficient now. This improves
428 performance for (among others) Half-Life 2, Counter Strike: Source,
429 and Source Engine games in general.
431 - The performance of sRGB samples is improved, this particularly helps
435 *** Platform-specific changes
437 - Joysticks POV switch and axis remapping are now better supported on
438 Linux. Joysticks are now supported on Mac OS X too.
440 - The various DVD I/O controls are now implemented on Mac OS X.
442 - The network routing and statistics functions in iphlpapi are now
443 implemented on Solaris and FreeBSD.
445 - Mach-O debugging symbols (the format used by Mac OS X) are now
446 supported in the debugger.
448 - Event ports are now used on Solaris for improved wineserver
452 *** New library dependencies
454 - The libgnutls library is now used for encryption and certificate
455 validation in secur32.
457 - The libgsm library is now used for the GSM codec support.
459 - The libmpg123 library is now used for mp3 decoding (except on Mac OS
460 X where CoreAudio functions are used instead).
462 - The libopenal library is now used for the openal32 dll
463 implementation, as well as for the mmdevapi dll (Vista sound
466 - The libtiff library is now used for TIFF image decoding in the
469 - The libv4l1 library is now used for video capture in DirectShow.
472 *** Backwards compatibility
474 - The wineshelllink helper script has been removed. All the menu and
475 desktop integration is now handled by winemenubuilder.
477 - The deprecated wineprefixcreate script has been removed. Wine prefix
478 directories are created automatically as needed.
480 - Old LinuxThreads setups are no longer supported. Wine now requires
481 the modern NPTL threading that has been standard on Linux for many
484 - The PBuffer option for off-screen rendering has been removed from
485 Direct3D. This code was unmaintained, and offered little advantage
486 over the "fbo" or "backbuffer" modes.
489 *** Known issues with recent 1.2 changes
491 - The subpixel font rendering doesn't yet look quite as nice as that
492 used by the rest of the Unix desktop.
494 - The OLE storage performance can degrade pretty badly on files with a
497 - There is no 64-bit version of the Gecko engine yet, so 64-bit
498 applications that use a browser control won't work correctly.
projects / wine / blob