CrossOver To Receive Profiles Support, Left 4 Dead 2

The next version of the Wine-based CrossOver application has been codenamed "Snow Mallard" and the next release of CrossOver Games has been codenamed "Zombie Mallard", reports CodeWeavers' Jeremy White. This announcement was made in honor of the one year anniversary of giving away CrossOver for free for one day.

Additionally, Jeremy exposed that CrossOver Snow Mallard (we anticipate it to be officially known as CrossOver 8.1) will provide a new feature being called Application Installer Profiles. With CrossOver's Application Installer Profiles, any individual or company independent of CodeWeavers can write support for CrossOver to use any application-specific optimizations (or "hacks") or any other workarounds that may be required for the application to run properly atop Wine/CrossOver. The Application Installer Profiles should allow for a greater range of Windows applications to easily run atop this licensed software.

Additionally, this next release of CrossOver features a complete rewrite of the client engine, which is reported to give a dramatic improvement in behavior for Linux users.

When it comes to CrossOver Games Zombie Mallard (we imagine it will be marketed as CrossOver Games 8.1) will feature support for new games, including the Left 4 Dead 2 game that is expected to be extremely popular.

The announcement regarding the CrossOver 8.1 series codenames was made on the CodeWeavers blog. No release date has been given for either the next CrossOver or CrossOver Games releases, but we would expect them to happen before year's end. Left 4 Dead 2 is being released on the 17th of November thereby putting the CrossOver Games release a few weeks out at a minimum.