Dear wine developers,
I have one question on the development of wine. Long(one or two years) ago I've heard that Microsoft got some hidden APIs in their products of various windows, and they use these APIs in their own applications. I wonder if this is still a problem on their recent product like windows XP. If it is, I guess wine will not be able to run such MS applications which uses hidden APIs. Is this right?
Yes, there are still several undocumented functions that prevent certain applications from working under wine. Specifically, many XP applications don't work because they use the undocumented function RtlGetNtVersionNumbers.
And, is wine designed(or its goal is) to run all applications(including MS product and non-MS product) that runs on windows?
Yes, the goal of wine is to eventually run all windows applications (except for device drivers). However, for Wine 1.0, the focus will be on running a set of widely used applications, such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, etc. Currently, many applications will work with a little tweaking. If you are using wine with Windows XP, you will have more success if you run wine with the command-line option, '-dll builtin ntdll,msvcrt'
Example: wine -dll ntdll,msvcrt=builtin yourapplication.exe
This will cause wine to use it's own ntdll instead of the one that comes with XP.
I hope this helps,
Josh