Wine compatibility

Adam Kłobukowski adamklobukowski at gmail.com
Wed Mar 23 12:48:52 CDT 2011


On 23.03.2011 16:01, James McKenzie wrote:
> 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.

What I meant as 'clean start' is that they could drop all hacks in 64bit 
environment. I wonder if that happened.

Adam Klobukowski



More information about the wine-devel mailing list