Wine 1.2 Release Candidate Announced 165
An anonymous reader writes "After evolving over 15 years to get to 1.0, a mere 2 years later and Wine 1.2 is just about here. There have been many many improvements and plenty of new features added. Listing just a few (doing no justice to the complete change set):
many new toolbar icons; support for alpha blending in image lists; much more complete shader assembler; support for Arabic font shaping and joining, and a number of fixes for video rendering; font anti-aliasing configuration through fontconfig; and improved handling of desktop link files. Win64 support is the milestone that marks this release. Please test your favorite applications for problems and regressions and let the Wine team know so fixes can be made before the final release. Find the release candidate here."
Re:"emulator"? (Score:4, Informative)
It doesn't emulate a platform API. It implements a platform API.
Re:"emulator"? (Score:1, Informative)
An emulator is any software which models a piece of digital hardware, exactly in the ideal case. (If it's something analog you're after, you approximate it by writing a simulator instead.)
You cannot "emulate" a software platform, you just rewrite it. Wine is a Windows API for Linux, BSD, and Mac. It's more like a clone than anything.
Re:The Wrong Way (Score:5, Informative)
Don't get too far ahead of yourself, the only ones dead so far are SCO and HURD.
Re:The Wrong Way (Score:3, Informative)
You can't (legally) run a Windows VM without paying Microsoft for the OS.
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
Even today, Windows 7 can run 16-bit code (scarily, 16-bit code can bypass security checks). You can turn off 16-bit support, if you research it.
The 64bit version of Vista and 7 cannot run 16bit code, actually. (Can't run the installer for Command & Conquer, for example) Wine now supports that part of the Windows legacy better than Windows itself.
Re:But Windows 7 Is So Schweet! (Score:3, Informative)
My [syntap.com] god [ucla.edu], Wine [winehq.org] has [tatanka.com.br] no [7-zip.org] use [utorrent.com] whatsoever [playonlinux.com]
Re:The Wrong Way (Score:3, Informative)
He's not. He's saying it's an extra cost to consider.
Re:What? (Score:3, Informative)
No, they are doing it because the 16-bit subsystem (NTVDM) uses the processor's virtual 8086 mode which is not available under x64. They would have to emulate the whole thing under x54, which is what Virtual PC [microsoft.com] does already.