14 DAY TRIAL // A new version of Wine (Wine is not an emulator), 1.7.29, has been made available and the developers have made a number of improvements and have added some fixes for various games and other apps.
Wine is an application that allows users to run Windows games and apps without having to install a Windows OS and without breaking any laws. It's a very reliable tool and many people are using it. Not everything that works in Windows will also work in Linux, and there are always apps that need fixing or patches from the Wine developers.
The 1.7.x branch of Wine is a development one and it's not stable. Still, this is probably the most used branch of the application and the main reason is that it also gets all the new features and fixes for the latest games. For a while, it looked like the devs were getting close to releasing another stable iteration of the software, but that's not the case anymore.
Apps and games that work with Wine 1.7.29
"Wine (originally an acronym for 'Wine Is Not an Emulator') is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, Mac OSX, & BSD. Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to cleanly integrate Windows applications into your desktop."
"Wine will always be free software. Approximately half of Wine's source code is written by volunteers, with the remaining effort sponsored by commercial interests, especially CodeWeavers, which sells a supported version of Wine," reads the official website.
Each new Wine version is accompanied by two different changelogs, one that deals with some of the biggest improvements and the second one that gathers all the fixes. For example, Wine 1.7.29 features much better shaping and BiDi mirroring in DirectWrite, a number of page fault problems have been corrected, and a few C runtime functions have been added.
The list of supported games and apps has also increased: Galactic Civilizations 2, Heroes of Might and Magic V, Hegemony Gold, Heroes of Newerth, Need For Speed Undeground, Lego Harry Potter, Final Fantasy XI, Imagelist, Jupiter, Mario Forever, Linia, Windows tree, and a few others.
How to get the latest version of Wine
Users can get Wine 1.7.29 from the source code, but Ubuntu users can install it from a PPA. Just enter these commands in a terminal (with root access):
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine