This is still the development version of Wine

Jul 10, 2015 15:16 GMT  ·  By

Wine developers have just revealed that a new version of the application has been released, and it comes with a large number of fixes and various other improvements.

Wine stands for "Wine is not an emulator" and that says pretty much everything about it. Developers have often said that Wine works pretty much like the compatibility setting in the Windows OS that lets users replicate older environments in newer versions. It's not exactly the same thing, but it's a compatibility layer and not an emulator per se.

That being said, each new Wine version usually brings a few improvements that have to do with the application itself and a large number of smaller fixes for apps and games. Not all the Wine releases are exciting, and the same can be said about this one.

What's new in Wine

According to the changelog, Text drawing in Direct2D is now possible, support has been added for the new thread pool API, toolbar state saving has been implemented, proper HID support has been added (incomplete for now), and support for file objects in device drivers has been added.

Wine 1.7.47 brings bug fixes for the following Windows games and tools: WeatherScope, NOLF2, Divinity 2, Dark Age of Camelot, Warhammer Online, 3DMark06, Battlefield 2, Outlook Express, Battlefield 1942, Civilization 4, Word 2010 Pro Plus, SecureCRT, Skyrim, Quake Live, NUMA Explorer, Microsoft Lync Basic 2013, and FotoSketcher.

More details about this release can be found in the official changelog. You can download Wine 1.7.47 source packages right now from Softpedia. It's possible to compile the package yourself, but there are quite a few dependencies, and it will take a while. Also, please keep in mind that if the applications you need already work with the stable version of Wine, then you should postpone upgrading to the new one.