Wine is announcing the second stable release since hitting the 1.0 mark, with the launch of Wine 1.2. The major version adds support for 64-bit applications and boasts new graphics. It has been in development for two years and comes with a significant amount of changes under the hood.

“The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 1.2 is now available. This release represents two years of development effort and over 23,000 changes. The main highlights are the support for 64-bit applications, and the new graphics based on the Tango standard. It also contains a lot of improvements across the board, and over 3,000 bug fixes,” the official announcement read. 

Highlights of Wine 1.2:

· 64-bit Windows application support on Linux machines with x86-64 processors;
· New icons for built-in apps and default UI elements based on the Tango icon theme for better integration with the underlying platform;
· Full translations for French, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Polish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, and Korean;
· Support for the XDG standard for application startup notifications;
· Subpixel font rendering support based on the relevant settings from the system fontconfig;
· An openal32 dll is now included which refers to the OpenAL Unix library;
· Greatly improved support for Direct 3D. Direct 3D 9 is now almost fully supported and there is initial support for Direct 3D 10;

The big new feature in Wine 1.2 is support for 64-bit apps. While pure 64-bit applications are not exactly widespread now, more and more software manufacturers release 64-bit versions and these will become prevalent in the not-so-distant future.

For gamers, the best news is the improved support for Direct 3D. With much of the Direct 3D dlls implemented, Linux users can enjoy playing their favorite game on their favorite platform without too much of a performance hit or glitches. Wine has released the source code for the latest version and says binary builds for popular distributions are coming.

Wine 1.2 is available for download here on Softpedia.