14 DAY TRIAL // The Wine developers announced the general availability of Wine 2.1, the first development release since the launch of Wine 2.0, which includes various improvements and multiple bug fixes.
Wine 2.1 comes about 10 days after the release of Wine 2.0 to implement additional Shader Model 5 instructions, add improvements to Direct2D rendering, as well as various line breaking improvements in DirectWrite, enhance the handling of MIME messages, and make the HID bus service run by default.
It also attempts to address many of the issues that were postponed during the code freeze development stage of the massive Wine 2.0 release, and according to the release notes, which we've also attached at the end of the article for your reading pleasure, it looks like more than 60 bugs were fixed in the Wine 2.1 development release.
Another interesting change implemented in Wine 2.1 is that source tarballs, which you can download right now from our website or directly from project's homepage, are finally compressed with the latest XZ compression algorithm, making the packages smaller and quicker to download.
Many Windows games and apps have been improved
As expected, Wine 2.1 adds better support for many Windows apps and games. Among the Windows games improved, we can mention SimCity 2000, The Chosen: Well of Souls, Jojo's Fashion Show 2: Las Cruces demo, X-COM: UFO Defense, Metal Fatigue, Railroad Tycoon 2: Platinum (Steam), Sims 3, Tanktics, Frogger, and Civilization V.
There are issues resolved for the Actua Soccer 2, Agarest Generations of War, Stars!, Harry Potter 7 Part 2, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, No Limits 2, Into the Stars, Ether One Redux, Everspace, Rush for Berlin Gold, Odallus: The Dark Call, and Adam Standalone demo games in the Wine 2.1 development release.
Moreover, it looks like The Solus Project, Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara, Star Ruler 2, Bug! (Sega Saturn), Sid Meier's Railroads!, Gauntlet, Warpath: 21st Century, Magic: The Gathering Online 4.0, and The Magic School Bus Explores games also received various fixes.
On the other hand, Wine 2.1 improves the Xara Designer Pro 6 demo, MiroVideoConverter, PDF-Xchange Viewer, Dyn Updater 4.1.10, Nanocad 5, ComicRack 0.9.x, HYPACK 2016, Git for Windows 2.7.0, RPG Maker 2003 (Steam), WOLF RPG Editor, MSRX 2015a, QQ 2013, Ecue Lighting Suite, Microsoft OneNote Free Retail, and Piriform Speccy 1.3 Windows apps.
Those who own Radeon R9 285 graphics cards will be happy to know that Wine 2.1 now correctly recognizes it. You can download Wine 2.1 right now and take it for a test drive on your Linux-based operating system, but please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version. We recommend using the Wine 2.0 stable release instead!