14 DAY TRIAL // The Wine developers have announced a new update for the 1.9 branch of Wine, which is now ready for download and testing.
The development branch of Wine is where all the excitement happens. The developers have made some changes to the release schedule of the application, and a stable version of Wine is now being launched only once a year. Smaller changes are being implemented in the rest of the time, pushing the envelope in what can be done.
The latest version of Wine has landed with quite a few interesting new features, although there’s nothing out of the ordinary. On the other hand, the fixes for apps and games are quite numerous, and some of them are rather interesting.
What's new in the latest Wine 1.9.5
Wine 1.9.5 hasn’t landed in the official repositories, but that will probably change in the next few days. According to the changelog, a new version of the Mono engine, with 64-bit support, has been added, some work has been done to implement WineD3D command stream, support has been added for effect states in Direct3DX, and some drag-and-drop improvements have been made as well.
Wine 1.9.5 brings with it changes to the following Windows games and tools: Adobe After Effects 4 PowerPoint 2003, LEGO Island (Mindscape), Jscript, Powerpoint 2003/2007, Process Hacker 2.x, Far Cry 4, ArchiCAD 16, Borderlands, World Of Tanks 9.2, Planetary Annihilation, Train Fever, Kontakt 5.4.x, Trainz: A New Era, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, Heroes of the Storm, and many others.
It’s not clear why the Wine developers are still covering some of these really old applications and games, especially since many of them have a Linux version as well.
More details about this release can be found in the official changelog. You can download Wine 1.9.5 source packages right now from Softpedia, but please keep in mind that you’ll need to compile it.