14 DAY TRIAL // The Wine Staging team announced today the release and immediate availability of the Wine Staging 2.9 release of the Wine testing branch based, of course, on the recently launched Wine 2.9 development version.
Borrowing all the features implemented in the Wine 2.9 development release, Wine Staging 2.9 is here with a new set of goodies for all you Linux gamers out there who want to play the latest Windows games or run various popular apps, the biggest change being support for tesselation shaders in Direct3D.
Additionally, Wine 2.9 brought binary mode support in WebServices, user interface improvements in RegEdit, as well as the ability to detect clipboard changes through Xfixes. On top of that, the Wine Staging 2.9 release improves compatibility with anti-cheat and DRM modules and generation of fake DLLs.
"The generated fake DLLs do no longer trigger stub errors when an application manually loads them (as in the 2.8 release), but instead they now forward the call to the correct builtin implementation," reads today's announcement. "Besides those bigger chances, there are many smaller improvements."
Unreal Engine 4 and Chrome get improvements
Among other changes implemented in the Wine Stating 2.9 release, we can mention the ability for the general memory layout of the built-in ELF/Mach-O executables to be more consistent with regular PE files, various improvements to the Unreal Engine 4 and Chrome, as well as the usual bug fixes, including for those from Wine 2.9.
Those of you using the Wine Staging branch on their GNU/Linux distributions for Windows gaming on their Linux boxes can download, compile and install the Wine Staging 2.9 source tarball right now from our website. Binary packages for various operating systems are also provided on the official homepage of the project.