1 The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 1.6
4 This release represents 16 months of development effort and around
5 10,000 individual changes. The main highlights are the new Mac driver,
6 the full support for window transparency, and the new Mono package for
7 .NET applications support.
9 It also contains a lot of improvements across the board, as well as
10 support for many new applications and games. See the release notes
11 below for a summary of the major changes.
13 The source is available from the following locations:
15 http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.6.tar.bz2
16 http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/1.6/wine-1.6.tar.bz2
18 Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
20 http://www.winehq.org/download
22 You will find documentation on http://www.winehq.org/documentation
24 You can also get the current source directly from the git
25 repository. Check http://www.winehq.org/git for details.
27 Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
28 AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
30 ----------------------------------------------------------------
32 What's new in Wine 1.6
33 ======================
38 - Window transparency is supported, including both color keying and
39 alpha blending transparency.
41 - All window rendering is done on the client-side using the DIB engine
42 (except for OpenGL rendering). This means that rendering to windows
43 or bitmaps gives identical results.
45 - Common dialogs correctly scale with the screen DPI resolution.
47 - In virtual desktop mode, shortcuts placed in the Desktop folder are
48 displayed on the desktop, and can be used to launch applications.
50 - The HTML Help control has better support for non-ASCII characters,
51 and for multiple help windows.
53 - Custom painting and images are better supported in listview
56 - Input validation is improved in the date and calendar controls.
61 - A native Mac OS X driver is implemented, for better integration with
62 the Mac desktop environment. The full range of driver features are
63 supported, including OpenGL, window management, clipboard, drag &
64 drop, system tray, etc.
66 - X11 is no longer needed on Mac OS X, but the X11 driver is still
67 supported, e.g. when running remotely.
69 Note: the Mac driver requires Mac OS X 10.6 or later, it cannot be
70 built or used on 10.5.
72 - FontConfig is no longer needed on Mac OS X and is disabled by
73 default, system fonts are enumerated using the Core Text API
79 - X11 server-side font rendering is no longer supported. All fonts are
80 rendered client-side using FreeType.
82 - The big lock around all X11 calls has been removed, we rely on the X
83 libraries internal locking for thread safety.
85 - XRandR versions 1.2 and 1.3 are supported.
90 - There are significant performance improvements in the DIB engine,
91 particularly for text rendering, bitmap stretching, alpha blending,
94 - Bounds tracking is supported for all graphics primitives, to enable
95 copying only the modified portions of a bitmap.
97 - OpenGL rendering is supported in device-independent bitmaps using libOSMesa.
99 - Brush dithering is implemented in the DIB engine.
101 - Path gradients are implemented in GdiPlus.
103 - More image codecs features are implemented, including JPEG encoding,
104 palette formats, and meta-data support for various image types.
109 - Sub-pixel font anti-aliasing is supported in the DIB engine, using
110 the system anti-aliasing configuration from FontConfig.
112 - Dynamic loading of scalable font resources is supported.
114 - Text layout in Uniscribe supports character-specific position
115 adjustments. Right-to-left text handling is also improved.
117 - There is an initial implementation of the DirectWrite text layout
120 - Built-in fonts are more complete, with the addition of FixedSys and
121 Wingdings fonts, more high-resolution pixel fonts, and a wider range
122 of glyphs in the existing fonts, notably Arabic glyphs in Tahoma.
124 - Bi-directional text support is improved in the RichEdit control.
129 - The raw input API is supported for keyboard and mouse input.
131 - There is a joystick applet in the control panel, to allow
132 configuring joysticks and testing their behavior.
134 - Force feedback is supported for Mac OS X joysticks.
139 - DOSBox is tried first when running a DOS application. The Wine DOS
140 support is only used as a fallback when DOSBox cannot be found, and
141 will be removed in a future release.
143 - A monotonic time counter is used on platforms that support it, to
144 make timers more robust against system time changes.
146 - File times are reported with nanosecond resolution.
148 - Wine can be configured to report the Windows version as 'Windows 8'.
153 - The Mono runtime is packaged as an MSI file, and its installation
154 can be managed from the "Add/Remove Programs" control panel. It is
155 automatically installed on Wine prefix updates.
157 - .NET mixed mode assemblies are supported.
159 - The Microsoft .NET 4.0 runtime can be installed for cases where Mono
160 is not good enough yet.
165 - The typelib writer is reimplemented for better compatibility.
167 - OLE DB supports more data types and conversions.
169 - OLE automation manages a cache of string allocations for better
170 performance and compatibility.
173 *** Internet and networking
175 - HTTPS connections use GnuTLS (or Secure Transport on Mac OS X).
176 OpenSSL is no longer used.
178 - The TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2 protocols are enabled by default, with
179 automatic fallback to TLS 1.0. The SSL2 protocol is disabled by
182 - Security certificate validation errors are handled better.
184 - NTLM and Negotiate authentication protocols are supported.
186 - ActiveX controls can be downloaded and installed automatically.
188 - Internet proxy bypass is supported, and can be enabled either
189 through the registry or with the no_proxy environment variable.
191 - Broadcast packets can be received on interface-bound sockets, which
192 is needed for some networked multi-player games.
194 - The Server Name Indication TLS extension is supported.
196 - Persistent cookies are supported, and URL cache files are managed
197 better. The Internet control panel allows clearing saved cookies and
200 - Punycode encoding for Internationalized Domain Names is supported.
202 - JavaScript performance is improved. The built-in JavaScript engine
203 is preferred over the Gecko one in most cases.
205 - Many more built-in functions of VBScript are implemented. Regular
206 expressions are also supported.
208 - The Gecko engine is updated to the version from Firefox 21.
210 - The Gecko and Mono installers are cached upon download, to allow
211 installation in multiple Wine prefixes without additional downloads.
216 - The Direct3D 9Ex implementation is more complete. In particular:
217 - IDirect3DDevice9Ex::PresentEx is implemented.
218 - IDirect3DDevice9Ex::ResetEx is implemented.
219 - Various Direct3D 9Ex display mode handling functions are implemented.
220 - Direct3D 9Ex style video memory accounting is implemented.
222 - Like the X11 driver, WineD3D no longer uses the big X11 lock when
225 - The WineD3D graphics card database is updated to recognize more
228 - The fallback card detection code for unrecognized graphics cards is
229 improved. This results in a more reasonable card being reported when
230 the graphics card is not already in the WineD3D database.
232 - WineD3D has GLSL based implementations of Direct3D fixed-function
233 vertex and fragment processing. In some cases this allows
234 functionality that's not present in fixed-function OpenGL to be
235 implemented, in other cases it allows functionality to be
236 implemented in a more efficient way.
238 - On drivers that support it, GL_ARB_debug_output is used to get more
239 detailed debugging output from the OpenGL driver.
241 - On drivers that support it, GL_ARB_framebuffer_sRGB is used for
242 rendering to frame buffers in the sRGB color space.
244 - On drivers that support it, GL_ARB_instanced_arrays is used for more
245 efficient instanced drawing.
247 - On drivers that support it, and return useful information,
248 GL_ARB_internalformat_query2 is used for more accurate reporting of
249 surface / texture format capabilities.
251 - There is an initial implementation of a HLSL compiler.
253 - Improvements to various parts of the D3DX9 implementation, including:
254 - The surface and texture handling functions. This includes code for
255 loading, saving, filling, and rendering to surfaces and textures.
256 - The effects framework.
257 - The constant table implementation.
258 - A number of spherical harmonics functions have been implemented.
259 - Support for .x files.
261 - Improvements to the Direct3D 10 implementation, including:
262 - Support for more shader model 4 opcodes and register types.
263 - Support for shader model 4 indirect addressing.
264 - Initial geometry shader support.
265 - Improved binary effect parsing.
266 - Support for Direct3D 10 style instanced draws, using
267 GL_ARB_draw_instanced.
272 - Vertex buffers are created with WINED3DUSAGE_DYNAMIC when locked with
273 DDLOCK_DISCARDCONTENTS, resulting in improved performance in some cases.
275 - The 2D-only fallback in WineD3D for using DirectDraw without a
276 working OpenGL implementation is more robust. Note that this still
277 isn't a recommended configuration.
282 - DirectSound has a better resampler.
284 - Audio device enumeration is improved, and multi-channel devices are
287 - VMR-9 video rendering is implemented.
292 - The PPD files of already installed printers are automatically
293 refreshed when needed.
295 - Printing resolution can be configured from the print dialog.
297 - Simulated italic fonts can be printed.
299 - On Mac OS X, the default paper size is retrieved from the system
303 *** Internationalization
305 - Japanese vertical text is correctly supported.
307 - Translated font names are used when there is a match for the current
310 - Wine is translated to French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch,
311 Swedish, Finnish, Portuguese, Catalan, Hungarian, Polish, Danish,
312 Russian, Slovenian, Lithuanian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and
313 Arabic. It has partial translations for another fifteen languages.
315 - Various additional Mac OS code pages are supported, namely Japanese,
316 Traditional Chinese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Romanian,
317 Ukrainian, Thai, and Croatian code pages. This improves support for
318 loading translated font names from Mac OS font files.
321 *** Built-in applications
323 - The new 'netstat' application displays information about active
326 - The 'cabarc' application supports multi-cabinet archives.
328 - The 'attrib' application supports recursing in sub-directories.
330 - The 'ipconfig' application can display IPv6 addresses.
332 - The 'start' application allows setting process priority and affinity.
334 - The 'cmd' application support arithmetic variable expansion,
335 comparison operators, and various extra features in 'for' loops.
337 - All graphical built-in applications have a 256x256 icon for use with
341 *** Build environment
343 - The configure script uses pkg-config when possible to find library
344 dependencies. Compiler and linker flags can be passed explicitly for
345 each dependency to override pkg-config where necessary.
347 - The IDL compiler supports nameless structs and unions and generates
348 portable C code for them.
350 - The IDL compiler generates the same header guards as the Microsoft
351 one for better header compatibility.
353 - Generated assembler files are built by invoking the C compiler when
354 possible, for better compatibility with the Clang tool chain.
356 - The Winedump tool can display the contents of typelib files.
358 - The Fnt2bdf tool has been removed since X11 server-side fonts are no
362 *** Platform-specific changes
364 - On Linux, dynamic device management supports the UDisks2 service.
366 - On Mac OS X, the Recycle Bin is mapped to the Mac OS Trash.
368 - Debugging support for ARM platforms is improved, including the
369 ability to display ARM assembly in the Wine debugger, and support
372 - Building Wine for the ARM64 platform is supported.
374 - There is preliminary support for building Wine for Android using the
377 - The DragonFly FreeBSD variant is supported.
379 - The Alpha and Sparc platforms are no longer supported.
384 - XML namespaces are better supported. XML parsing is also implemented
385 in the XMLLite library.
387 - Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is implemented, with a wide
388 range of WBEM system classes.
390 - A number of forwarding libraries are added to support the API Sets
391 feature added in Windows 8.
393 - More of the latest functions of the C runtime are implemented,
394 particularly the locale functions. Exception handling and RTTI are
397 - The standard C++ class libraries are more complete, particularly the
398 math functions and the stream classes.
401 *** New external dependencies
403 - LibOSMesa is used for OpenGL rendering to device-independent bitmaps.
406 *** Useful configuration options
408 Note: More details about these and other configuration options can be
409 found at http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys
411 - Client-side window rendering can be disabled if necessary by setting
412 "ClientSideGraphics" to "N" under HKCU\Software\Wine\X11 Driver.
414 - On Mac OS X, in case an application doesn't work properly with the
415 Mac driver, it is possible to go back to the X11 driver by setting
416 "Graphics" to "x11" under HKCU\Software\Wine\Drivers.
418 - Some X11 compositors do not cope properly with transparent windows
419 that use non-rectangular shapes. In that case, window shaping can be
420 disabled by setting "ShapeLayeredWindows" to "N" under
421 HKCU\Software\Wine\X11 Driver.
423 - The "VertexShaderMode" and "PixelShaderMode" settings under
424 HKCU\Software\Wine\Direct3D have been replaced by the "MaxShaderModelVS",
425 "MaxShaderModelGS" and "MaxShaderModelPS" (DWORD) settings. These allow
426 limiting the maximum supported shader model version. Setting these to 0
427 disables support for the corresponding shader type, like "VertexShaderMode"
428 and "PixelShaderMode" did.
430 - The default value for the "AlwaysOffscreen" setting under
431 HKCU\Software\Wine\Direct3D is "enabled". It can still be disabled
432 by setting it to "disabled".
437 - The addition of DirectWrite causes Steam to be unable to display
438 text. This can be fixed either by setting dwrite.dll to disabled for
439 steam.exe using Winecfg, or by running Steam with the -no-dwrite
442 - The removal of the big X11 lock can reveal locking bugs in old Xlib
443 versions, notably on RHEL 5. The only solution is to upgrade the X