Wine 5.4 Released With Unicode 13 Support, Text Drawing For D3DX9 To Fix 10 Year Old Bug

Wine 5.4 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release and it comes with a number of improvements.

Wine 5.4's official list of new features include:

- Unicode data updated to Unicode version 13.
- Builtin programs use the new UCRTBase C runtime.
- More correct support for Internationalized Domain Names.
- Support for painting rounded rectangles in Direct2D.
- Text drawing in D3DX9.

The Unicode 13.0 support is quite punctual with it only being released earlier this week.

Text drawing support for D3DX9 is about time... It closes a decade-old bug report. There has been this bug report since 2010 about games like Europa Universalis Rome and other games not having text rendered. That is finally fixed thanks to a basic ID3DXFont_DrawText implementation hitting Wine 5.4 thanks to CodeWeavers. That's great news for those enjoying any vintage games on Linux via Wine.

Wine built-in programs using the new UCRTBase C run-time is also significant and the new UCRT library support has been coming together in recent Wine 5.x development snapshots.

There are 34 known bug fixes with Wine 5.4 as outlined via the change-log on WineHQ.org.