We reported at the end of last week that the Wine developers are working hard these days on the next major update of the open-source software that lets Linux users instal and run all sorts of Windows applications and games.

On February 5, 2016, they released Wine 1.9.3, the third milestone towards Wine 1.10, which will become the new stable branch of the project, replacing the current Wine 1.8 series.

Wine 1.9.3 brought in features like a Firefox 44-based Gecko engine, JSON support in JavaScript, more Shader Model 4 instructions, extra write support in WebServices, as well as improvements to DirectWrite's line breaking.

Now, we're reporting the release of Wine Staging 1.9.3, which includes compatibility fixes for a bunch of older Windows games, better detection of MPEG-2 streams, support for AVIFile interface proxies, and some much-needed fixes.

"Before talking about the changes, I would like to apologize that there weren't any release notes since 1.8. I just didn't had much time lately to write them, but this was unrelated to the actual development progress of Wine Staging," developer explains.

Seven old Windows games have received updates and should work better in the new Wine Staging development release. These are Summoner, Wing Commander IV, The Journeyman Project 2, Joint Operations Typhoon Rising, Neverwinter Nights 2, Galactic Civilization 2, and Rush for Berlin Gold.

Also, BitComet versions prior to 1.37 are now supported in Wine Staging 1.9.3, which is available for download right now from Softpedia or directly from the project's website. Please try to keep in mind though that this is a pre-release version of Wine Staging, which means that you should not use on your production-ready machine.