Wine 1.5.6 has been released!

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Wine is a free and open source application that allows users to run Windows software on other operating systems. Wine is always under heavy development with the team preparing one release every 2 weeks. Yesterday, the founder and current leader of the project Alexandre Julliard, announced the availability of version 1.5.6, that brings some important additions and fixes.

What’s new in this release:
- Automatic installation of the Mono add-on package.
- Control panel applet for joysticks.
- Device bitmap rendering now done through the DIB engine.
- Support for video rendering through DirectX (VMR-9).
- First steps towards a D3D shader compiler.
- Build fixes for DragonFly BSD.
- Various bug fixes.

The D3D Shader compiler is wonderful news, but I think we’ll have to wait some time before we see any real functionality. VMR-9 is a filter bundled inside Directx9 that allows the transformation of video images using the Direct3D pixel shaders. It is only natural for Wine to be a behind Windows that uses a newer filter for some years now.

Some of the specific applications bugs fixed include:

- Adobe Flash Player 9 and 10: movies and images are messed up
- The Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria doesn’t start
- Sound does not work in Big Fish Games when acceleration is set to full
- Medieval Total War Gold DVD Italian – Unload the debugger error
- Rise of Nations Gold Edition Nuclear Blast Effect Looks Awful
- Machinarium window does not show any contents and hangs desktop
- Office Professional Plus 2010 install fails without machine.config file
- EVE Online crashes on attempt to move window
- Sanitarium crashes/hangs frequently with OpenGL renderer

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