Wine 6.19 is out new with more joystick work, more modules converted to PE

The Wine 6.19 development release is out now following more weeks of hacking away trying to create the best possible Windows compatibility layer. Part of what makes up Steam Play Proton. Once a year or so, a new stable release is made.

The Wine 6.19 release highlights include:

• IPHlpApi, NsiProxy, WineDbg and a few other modules converted to PE.
• More HID joystick work.
• Kernel parts of GDI moved to Win32u.
• More work towards Dwarf 3/4 debug support.

With HID joystick enabled by default as of Wine 6.18, this further work continues to help improve compatibility. The original idea was to bring together joystick support under one banner in Wine, hopefully resulting in more games and applications working properly.

The continued conversion of various modules to PE is another that will gradually increase compatibility in many ways over time for expected behaviour. 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.

For bugs reported as fixed as of this release they noted 22 including issues solved for: Open Metronome, FreeOrion, Levelhead, Darksiders Warmastered Edition, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Control Ultimate Edition, A Plague Tale: Innocence, Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales and more.