Improves generation of functional 32-bit fake DLL

May 20, 2017 12:13 GMT  ·  By

The Wine Staging team announced the release of version 2.8 of the open-source compatibility layer for running Windows programs on top of Linux-based operating systems.

Based on last week's Wine 2.8 release, Wine Staging 2.8 is here with various improvements of its own, including a new mechanism for updating shared data time fields, which is required by various games like Star Wars: The Old Republic or by the Go programming language, as well as the ability to generate more functional 32-bit fake DLLs, which are used in the application as placeholders inside of Wine prefixes.

"The content of those placeholders does not matter unless applications try to load such files without using the Windows API, which some DRM / anticheat modules unfortunately do. With Wine Staging 2.8 you will now get a stub exception instead of a random crash when such a DLL is used. For ntdll functions starting with Nt or Zw prefix the fake DLL will correctly forward calls to the real implementation," explain the devs.

Basic ACL viewer, small bug fixes and improvements

Another interesting thing implemented in the Wine Staging 2.8 release is a basic ACL viewer, which promises to allow users to view the Windows access control list (ACL) directly in the Security tab of the File Properties dialog. This could be useful when debugging issues related to access permissions. Wine Staging 2.8 also improves support for the first StarCraft game, which should now work properly when using the default Windows 7 prefix.

Various other small, yet important improvements and bug fixes landed as well in Wine Staging 2.8, which inherits all the goodies from the Wine 2.8 development release, such as better automatic detection of serial and parallel ports, improved HiDPI settings, and system tray notifications on macOS. You can download Wine Staging 2.8 and Wine 2.8 right now from our website or install them from the default software repositories of your GNU/Linux distro.