MS' hidden API

[Joshua Thielen]

>
>
>Dear wine developers,
>
>I have one question on the development of wine. Long(one or
>two years) ago I've heard that Microsoft got some hidden
>APIs in their products of various windows, and they use
>these APIs in their own applications. I wonder if this is
>still a problem on their recent product like windows XP. If
>it is, I guess wine will not be able to run such MS
>applications which uses hidden APIs. Is this right?
>
Yes, there are still several undocumented functions that prevent certain 
applications from working under wine. Specifically, many XP applications 
don't work because they use the undocumented function 
RtlGetNtVersionNumbers.

>
>And, is wine designed(or its goal is) to run all
>applications(including MS product and non-MS product) that
>runs on windows?
>
Yes, the goal of wine is to eventually run all windows applications 
(except for device drivers). However, for Wine 1.0, the focus will be on 
running a set of widely used applications, such as Microsoft Office, 
Lotus Notes, etc. Currently, many applications will work with a little 
tweaking. If you are using wine with Windows XP, you will have more 
success if you run wine with the command-line option, '-dll builtin 
ntdll,msvcrt'

Example: wine -dll ntdll,msvcrt=builtin yourapplication.exe

This will cause wine to use it's own ntdll instead of the one that comes 
with XP.

I hope this helps,

Josh