Wine running (not so) random applications (with a few bugs)...

[Reece Dunn]

Several releases back, I tried getting the Cepstral SwiftTalker
Text-To-Speech program working, but to no avail. I tried again last
night and was surprised that it worked! So I decided to throw several
applications at Wine out of the box, with no modifications and see how
well it did.

These are my findings:


== Firefox 3 (Beta 4)

I have basically reproduced Dan Kegel's findings (including bugs 12305
and 1237). I also successfully upgraded from beta 4 to 5 and ran in
both XP and Vista modes. Other things I noticed:

  * firefox dialogs (e.g. the "Default Browser" dialog) are cropped at
the bottom, cutting off the buttons (bug 12511).

Verdict: Very close to perfect. Usable for most things with a few
minor annoyances.


== Cepstral SwiftTalker (http://downloads.cepstral.com/downloads/)

This is a text-to-speech program that I use constantly. It now works
under Wine - yay! Using an unregistered voice, voice rendering is
smooth and sentence reading highlighting is synchronised perfectly,
even at 374 words per minute!

Issues:

  * Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End don't work as on Windows (go to the
start/end of the document). This is the same in notepad (bug 12512).

  * Changing the voice speed also changes the font to Courier New
Italic. It looks like the SwiftTalker application is using Courier New
initially (and rendering correctly on startup), but when you edit the
Tools->Options, it does not find Courier New in the available fonts
(bug 12513).

  * There is a slight audio glitch when using a registered voice that
is noticeable either as a pop or as an overlapped playback with the
previous word whenever there is a sentence changeover. This is hardly
noticable on the default 170 WPM, but is more pronounced on my default
247 WPM setting.

Verdict: Near perfect. The audio glitch can get irritating at times
and is the only thing preventing me giving this a Perfect verdict.


== Popcap Games

There can't be an application test list without mentioning games, so
here we are. The games tested were:
  * Peggle (http://popcap.com/games/peggle)
  * Bejeweled 2 (http://popcap.com/games/bejeweled2)

The games run smoothly, including sound, full screen graphics and
custom cursors.

Issues:

  * The installer fails to create Uhttp://mail.google.com/mail/RL
links (e.g. http://www.popcap.com)

  * Selecting hardware acceleration from within Peggle causes the game
to render a black screen.

Verdict: Perfect.


== Yahoo Games (http://games.yahoo.com/downloads)

Even more games, e.g. Aveyond.

Issues:

  * Could not get past the initial page as the gecko HTML engine
failed to install resulting in the "HTML rendering is currently
disabled" text appearing. This is a regression, as it worked in older
versions of Wine. NOTE: I haven't done a bisect yet.

Verdict: Non-starter.


Thanks for all the great work. Wine keeps on improving release on
release and continues to amaze me. Special thanks to the CodeWeavers
team and the DirectX developers for all the hard work gone into making
Wine what it is today.

- Reece