Curious about coverage

Curious about coverage

This is not what I hear from the Wine developers. The Wine developers have said that although it is sometimes reported that the win32 API being a moving target makes it hard for Wine, that's not really true. Applications developers still want their stuff to run on, say, Windows 98. Undocumented, poorly documented, and buggy API calls seem to be a bigger problem. Wine has to reproduce even the API bugs faithfully.

Wine's main problem, last I looked, was its incompleteness. Many API functios being simply stubs which do nothing but print "FIXME".

To be honest, when I encounter a situation in which I am forced into the position of trying to run a app for a client under Wine, I don't go into it with much hope.

On the other hand, I have seen wine do some amazing things. Back in 1999 or so, I got the original "Unreal" running under Wine. It took a solid weekend of work, but when I was finished it worked absolutely perfectly, with 3DFX Voodoo Glide accelleration at 800x600, perfectly synchronized sound, and perfect stability. I played the whole game through twice without a single crash. I even compared my frame rates with someone with similar hardware and won.

The problem is, you can then turn around and run something really simple and it will crash even before the main window comes up.

I must say I have never seen a project that progressed with such agonizing slowness as the Wine project. Not a criticism of its developers. They've simply taken on a *big* job.