The Wine Project has released version 11.20 of its development branch, bringing several improvements to the popular open-source compatibility layer that allows Windows applications and games to run on Linux and other operating systems.
One main change is adding relay debugging support for ARM64EC, Microsoft’s application binary interface that lets ARM64 and x64 code coexist in the same process on Windows on Arm.
The update also improves XML validation, relevant for Windows applications that rely on Microsoft’s XML components. Another change moves CD-ROM support into Wine’s Mount Manager, consolidating how Wine handles these devices.
On the bug-fixing side, Wine 11.20 resolves 24 reported issues affecting a variety of Windows applications and games.
Among them are fixes for Microsoft Office 2013’s Click-to-Run installer, which failed when saving XML documents using Unicode encoding, and QuickBooks 2008–2010, which had licensing initialization errors. OneDrive also gets a fix for a crash related to Wine’s incomplete implementation of cldapi.dll.
Multimedia applications are covered too. MusicBee experienced an out-of-memory exception in WoW64 mode, while FL Studio could unintentionally select menu items by opening a menu with the mouse hovering over an entry. The release also addresses window decoration problems in SumatraPDF and TagScanner.
For gamers, the fixes include crashes in Pure Pinball and Incoming (1998), audio stuttering and performance drops in Star Wolves 3, and missing music and sound effects in Imperium: Great Battles of Rome.
Other resolved issues affect UFO: Aftershock and UFO: Afterlight when using Nvidia’s proprietary drivers with the EGL backend, as well as a directory-related problem preventing Battlefield 1942 from copying its secdrv.sys driver.
Another fix addresses a regression introduced in Wine 11.19, where parsing a large /etc/hosts file could cause initializing a new Wine prefix to stall.
Finally, the release includes several ARM64-specific fixes involving C++ exception handling and CPU state restoration, along with a Media Foundation fix for DXGI texture handling that could prevent video playback in applications using Unreal Engine 4’s ElectraPlayer.
For more details, visit the announcement. Wine 11.20 is now available as source code, while binary packages for supported Linux distributions are expected through WineHQ and the respective distribution repositories.
