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Comment by lolo_ | Hacker News Reader

Hilarious to see a fix specifically for Ultima IX in this release - https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13683

Ultima IX, apart from being a terrible, awful end to a great series was renowned for being buggy as hell.

Kudos to the wine developers, if you're fixing things like this, you have an unbelievable attention to detail!

Reading the messages on this bug shows you how much of a hunt it was. It turned out to be undocumented messaging behavior in user32.

The Win32 documentation is sometimes best treated as historical fiction with an unreliable narrator. This is why Wine has a massive suite of test cases.

That's a clever way of perpetuating vendor lock-in: write shitty documentation that is still helpful for application developers but also simultaneously makes life VERY hard for interop layer developers (like the WINE project).

And given MS's business practices in the past (seem a very different company these days) it's actually pretty believable at least some of this was on purpose.

Certainly when you take into account all the undocumented API functions used by office et al.

Perhaps Microsoft's recent move towards open source might might thinks easier - as far as I can tell there are far too many copyright issues with the _entirety_ of the windows source code for a complete open sourcing there, but they could perhaps open up core parts of the codebase.

Imagine Microsoft engineers contributing to wine also. Perhaps I am dreaming :)

I call it "calculated altruism." :)

Lotta the Codeweavers Wine devs are gamers, so of course they want their games to work too ;-)

The same games they've been playing for a LONG time. ;)

As a die hard Ultima fan, I just try to forget that Ultima IX ever existed.

This is in large part why I am so impressed by the fix. U9 arguably one of the worst games ever released, though largely because the series is otherwise so great (8 wasn't great but after patches wasn't _terrible_.)

Not many people want to play it these days as a result, so if they're fixing _this_ then they must really be comprehensive.

best test case ever

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