Wine compatibility

James McKenzie jjmckenzie51 at gmail.com
Wed Mar 23 10:01:54 CDT 2011


On 3/23/11, Adam Kłobukowski <adamklobukowski at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello
>
> I have a question for Wine developers, not 100% related to development,
> so: please excuse me for wasting your time.
>
> Officially sated, Wine wants to be 'bug-by-bug' implementation of
> Windows APIs. On the other hand, it is known that all (?) version of
> Windows contain 'hacks' to make important and not well behaving
> applications work (mostly workarounds for application bugs). This
> 'hacks' work by detecting that a faulty app is running, and turning
> special 'hack' mode for such app. Because of this, black box testing
> often used by Wine developers will not detect such workarounds, and
> applications that (seem to) work perfectly well under Windows, will not
> work under Wine.
>
And some programs that worked 'just fine' under WindowsXP will not in
any other version due to the internal hacks.

> Is there a solution for this? What is Wine devs position on this matter?

Sure.  We look at the interaction between the program and the Windows
API (this is how true Black Box testing is done), implement a test
case and then build code to the test case.

>
> Side question: Windows could make a 'clean start' with 64 bit
> environment, did they?

If that happened, there would have not been any version of Windows
with 64 bitness for about twenty years.  Microsoft 'extended' their
code to work in a 64 bit environment.  This is common with existing 32
bit code to extend it to 64 bits.

James McKenzie



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