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The latest development release of the Windows compatibility layer Wine for running Windows games and applications on Linux is out now with Wine 6.18. It's also part of what makes up Steam Play Proton. Once a year or so, a new stable release is made.

Here's the highlights of Wine 6.18:

  • Shell32 and WineBus libraries converted to PE.
  • Unicode data updated to Unicode version 14.
  • Mono engine updated to version 6.4.0, with COM improvements.
  • More work towards Dwarf 3/4 debug support.
  • HID joystick enabled by default.

With the HID joystick enabled by default this should hopefully improve input with Windows games and applications run through Wine. The idea is to pull together joystick support under one banner but it's not going to magically make everything work.

As of this release the Wine team noted 19 bugs fixed. A mix of issues solved with this release or before including problems sorted for: MPGUI (a modding tool for Morrowind , Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout3/NV), Resident Evil 7, Timespinner and various other miscellaneous applications.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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5 comments

AussieEevee Sep 26, 2021
Shell32 and WineBus libraries converted to PE.
Dumb question, but what does this mean?
rcrit Sep 26, 2021
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From the 6.17 release announcement on GoL at https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/09/wine-development-release-617-is-out-with-continued-work-for-the-gdi-syscall-interface

In regards to many things being "converted to PE" over multiple Wine releases: previously Wine has built its Win32 libraries (like DLLs and EXEs) as ELF but for many reasons (like better compatibility) they've started to move them over to use PE instead. So it's another change that will gradually improve compatibility as more is moved over.
kaiman Sep 27, 2021
Seems the HID joystick stuff needs a bit more work. With Wine 6.18, my gamepad is broken. Had to revert to 6.17 for now.
strycore Sep 28, 2021
I wish I knew what this HID joystick thing was. It sounds interesting and better controller support is badly needed in Wine. Sadly, I'm entirely clueless on what HID joysticks are and how they differ from the previous Wine implementation.
DMJC Oct 6, 2021
Hopefully they haven't broken Force Feedback support. It's been working for 20 years. I'd like to use it for another 20.


Last edited by DMJC on 6 October 2021 at 9:40 am UTC
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