Wine 6.7 Is Released With 44 Bug-Fixes
The latest development versin of the popular Wine Windows API re-implementaiton has 44 mostly game and application-specific bug fixes, NetApi32, WLDAP32, and Kerberos libraries converted to portable executables, improved plug and play driver support and some new media foundation code under the hood. You still can't play Mario Kart DX12 with it.
written by 林慧 (Wai Lin) 2021-04-24 - last edited 2021-04-24. © CC BY
Wine 6.7 failing to run the PC scene demo For Your Love by Andromeda Software Development because "unimplemented function". "For Your Love" won 2nd place at the Assembly 2018 PC demo competition.
Wine Is Not an Emulator, it is a complete Windows API re-implementation that lets you run a lot of Windows software on GNU/Linux operating systems. The latest Wine 6.7 development release increases the range of Windows software it can run by a few hairs, yet there is still a lot to be desired in terms of general Windows compatibility.
Wine 6.7 fixes a crash of installation of multiple applications like Autdesk 3ds Max9 and Informix Database, a crash with NotImplementedException at IWebBrowser2.get_LocationName() that affected several bussiness related programs like SharpDevelop and Clarion Enterprise, fixes for several audio programs like Rekordbox 5.3.0 and Winamp and a crash fix for the immesily popular WeChat chat application from the China-based Tencent Holdings Ltd. Americans and Europeans are generally not familiar with WeChat, it is mostly used in Asia where it is a extremely popular way of sharing every aspect of your life with the Chinese authorities.
There's also fixes for a longer list of games like NHL09, CS:GO (though we don't know why anyone plays that in Wine when there is a perfectly fine native GNU/Linux version free on Steam), Supreme Commander Forged Alliance, Melodyne 5 and Fairy Tale About Father Frost. BioShock Remastered and Legends of Runeterra would both crash at launch with previous versions. They don't anymore, but they are far from perfect experiences.
Wine still has a long way to go before you can run any random piece of Microsoft Windows software and expect it to work prefectly.
You still can't use it to play Mario Kart DX12 (available from itch.io) with Wine 6.7. Wine support for that particular game has gotten worse, not better, since Wine 6.3 was released in February. It used to be possible to get past the loading screen and enjoy a in-game crash the moment you started a race. Mario Kart DX12 doesn't even get to kart selection screen in Wine 6.7, it crashes much earlier with a cryptic message about fixme:combase:RoGetActivationFactory Windows.Gaming.Input.Gamepad. We do not know what CodeWeavers, the corporation who employees the people who make 98% of all Wine code contributions, meant by that.
PC scene demos is one particular area where Wine 6.7, like previous versions, is exposed as being very limited in terms of general compatibility. There is, in general, less than a 20% chance that any random recent PC demo you fetch from scene.org will work fine in Wine. That includes many older PC scene demos like Fr-063: Magellan, Ceasefire all fall down by cncd & fairlight, Devolution by Kewlers, The Nose Is The Limit by sp04, Freon by division and many, many more.
Quantum by Outracks vs Nazareth Creations running in Wine, with DXVK, at 1080p. It won 2nd place in the The Gathering 2009 PC demo competition.
We tried to run the top 10 price winners at the Assembly 2020 PC demo competition with Wine 6.7. First place, "number one/another one" by carillon & cyberiad & fairlight, wouldn't run. Second place, "for your love" by Andromeda Software Development, produced the crash shown at the beginning of this article. Third place, dying stars by orange, runs.. like a slide-show at 1280x720.
The problems Wine has running PC scene demos is not limited to newer PC scene demos. Older ones like Rupture by Andromeda Software Development, a demo that won 1st place in the The Gathering 2009 demo competition, fails to run in Wine 6.7. Quantum by Outracks vs Nazareth Creations, the runner up that won 2nd place in the demo competition at TG 2009, works perfectly. It's kind of a toss-up how Wine plays with software in this rather specific software genre. Older DirectX 9 demos, like Fr-041: d e b r i s, tends to run better than newer ones using DirectX 11 or 12.
Fr-041: d e b r i s at in Wine running at 1080p.
Wine still has a very long way before you can download any random PC scene demo and expect there to be anywhere near a 50%/50% chance it will work. The codeweavers.com-employed developers are making small steps in the right direction with each new Wine release, but there is still much to be desired in terms of general Windows compatibility.
All the top contributors to this Wine release were employees of the codeweavers.com corporation. Those were:
Zebediah Figura, who spent most of her time on winebus.sys and wined3d, is the clear winner of the most code commits award for this release. That's great because wined3d really is an area in dire need of improvement. Wine's built-in DirectX 9 to 11 to OpenGL translation layer remains horribly slow compared to the DXVK DirectX 9 to 11 to Vulkan translation layer in Wine 6.7. You really should be using DXVK if you use Wine to play Windows games on Linux.
The source code for Wine 6.7 can be acquired from dl.winehq.org/wine/source/6.x/. You can also find binary packages for many GNU/Linux distributions and instructions on how to use them at https://www.winehq.org/download. The Wine website, where you can find documentation and a game compatibility database, is at www.winehq.org.
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