14 DAY TRIAL // On February 7, Alexandre Julliard announced a new development version of the Wine app, which comes with a interesting set of improvements, including some for Windows 8.1.
As usual, the number of new features and bug fixes in the development version of Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is quite large, and the current build is no different.
The most important new features in Wine are: initial support for Window Media Player interfaces, better Task Scheduler support, various C++ runtime fixes, and probably the most important, more dlls with ugly names for Windows 8 API set support.
Wine 1.7.12 also brings bug fixes for the following Windows games and tools: Capitalism II, Football Manager 2008, Photoshop CS2, FlightGear, Dragon Age, Eve Online, µTorrent, Visio 2007, Office 2003, Ubisoft Game Laucher, Neverwinter Nights, Steam, Password Gorilla, Counter Strike: Source, League of Legends, Divinity II, and more.
Highlights of Wine 1.7.12:
• USB serial ports are now working properly; • Users can now install Football Manager 2008; • Photoshop CS2 no longer complains with the message "Please log in using an account with administrator privileges and try again"; • Having CPU switch frequency dynamically (powersave daemon) no longer makes Prince of Persia run way too fast; • A Photoshop CS4 error in automate/merge HDR and photomerge has been fixed; • x86_64 OS is no longer selectable on a 32-bit system; • Office 2003 apps no longer fail to print graphics with built-in gdiplus; • Microsoft Visio 2003 no longer fails to save files; • Blackberry Device Manager 6.1 now installs properly; • WinZIP 7 no longer crashes when extracting a zip archive.
More details about this release can be found in the official changelog. Download Wine 1.7.12 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.