Wine 8.0 with support for Portable Executable 32bit apps is out

Wine developers have released Wine 8.0. It is a major release with more than 8600 changes. The biggest changes are improved support for 32-bit apps on 64-bit systems and for Portable Executable programs.

The developers to write that Wine 8.0 is generally available. In recent years, the developers have been working on supporting Portable Executable software. From now on, all modules can also be packaged in such a PE format. This makes it possible to run 32-bit applications on 64-bit systems. That doesn’t work perfectly yet, the makers warn, because not everything goes through NT yet. This will be improved in upcoming releases. WoW64 thunks have been implemented for most Unix libraries, eliminating the need for 32bit libraries altogether. For applications that do not yet have a 32-bit wine loader, the applications are run in experimental mode with a 64-bit host. However, the makers warn that that function does not yet work properly.

Other changes to the tool include optimizations for Direct3D and more graphics drivers should be supported in the future. Also, the creators have improved the Vulkan rendering engine.

From now on, the tool has a standard light theme and an updated joystick control panel with input for XInput devices. There is also better support for steering wheels for racing games and the Print Processor architecture is supported.