Wine 2.0-rc4 released for final testing of the software

Jan 9, 2017 00:27 GMT  ·  By

The Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) team is back from the Christmas and New Year's holidays, and to kick off 2017 they've just announced the availability of the Wine development release 2.0 RC4.

Wine adds a compatibility layer on Linux, macOS or BSD operating system, allowing users to run applications and games that are designed only for Microsoft Windows OSes, and Wine 2.0 will be out soon as the newest major release of the open-source software, but until then, you're invited to test drive the fourth RC build.

It's been a little over two weeks after the release of Wine 2.0 RC3, but it looks like the development team was pretty busy fixing the last remaining blockers before Wine 2.0 hits stable. The release notes show us that a total of 28 bugs reported by users have been addressed in the Wine 2.0 RC4 snapshot.

Here are the Windows apps and games that'll work better

Among the Windows games that should work better with Wine 2.0 RC4, we can mention Heroes of Might and Magic IV, which had some performance issues with the OpenGL renderer, as well as SWAT 4, fixing the bug where the mouse cursor escaped the Wine environment while in windowed or full-screen mode.

Gruntz should no longer crash on startup, various graphical glitches were resolved for Halo: Combat Evolved, The Sims 3 won't use 100% of the CPU, nor lock the display when running windowed, and a black screen will no longer be displayed for the Steam version of Strania - The Stella Machina during launch.

Other than that, Wine 2.0 RC4 adds some minor fixes to the Motocross Madness, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Highway Pursuit, Halo, Yume Miru Kusuri: A Drug That Makes You Dream, Whirlwind of Vietnam, Duo 0.10, and Heroes Of Might & Magic VI games, as well as to the Battle.net launcher/installer.

As for the improved Windows apps, we can mention that Altium Designer 10 should no longer hang during startup, characters and logos won't be rendered as black rectangles for TMIDI Player, iTunes should allow the use of Ctrl+C for closing the window, and the LINE mobile messenger now works as expected.

Wine 2.0 Release Candidate 4 is now available for download if you plan on taking it for a test drive to report bugs or in case you're interested to see if a certain Windows app or game works. However, please note that this is a pre-release version, not suitable for use in production environments. Wine 2.0 is expected at the end of the month.

Wine 2.0 RC4 Changelog