Following yesterday's Wine 9.8 release that fixes a nearly 20 year old bug for installing Microsoft Office 97 , Wine-Staging 9.8 is out today as the even more experimental blend of Wine that carries hundreds of extra patches that are going through a testing period toward upstreaming into the main codebase.

Wine-Staging 9.8 comes in at 430 patches over the current Wine 9.8 upstream state. Wine-Staging 9.8 is slightly leaner than prior releases due to having upstreamed a number of WIDL patches as well as the stdole32.tlb patch that fixed the Microsoft Office 97 installation issue. Plus a few patches were dropped from Wine-Staging 9.8 for Pipelight, Wine X11 XEMBED, and others.

Wine-Staging 9.8 does update its bundled VKD3D Git code as well as pulling in a few other updated patches. The only new patch this two-week cycle is for fixing Bug 46012 . This bug is a six year old report around invisible textures with the game Command & Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath.

The patch is for implementing ID3DXEffect::SetRawValue so it's possible other games/software may benefit too.

Those wanting to download the new v9.8 releases of Wine or Wine-Staging can find the new builds up on WineHQ.org .