Wine, the open source implementation of the Microsoft API, has been improved indirectly by Google to run some select applications, including Photoshop CS2.
While this isn’t particularly interesting news for games at this moment in time, if there is greater corporate interest in improving these open source technologies, you could in theory see a variety of Windows games have improved performance and compatibility on any system that Wine supports.
In January 2006, Google contracted with CodeWeavers to improve Wine to run Picasa version 2.2 properly. Some of the changes fix bugs in Wine; others implement previously unimplemented features. This effort resulted in 225 patches committed to winehq between 1 January and 18 April 2006. See the list below, or download the exact Wine source tarball used for Picasa 2.2 (14 MB).
We also asked a few interns (Benjamin Arai, Dan Hipschman, James Hawkins, and Thomas Kho), to improve a few areas of wine (e.g. oleaut32, widl, msi, and riched20). Together they committed about 300 patches to the winehq git tree.
We also contracted with Codeweavers to improve Wine so it could run Photoshop CS2 properly. As a result, about 200 patches were committed to winehq, and as of wine-0.9.54, Photoshop CS2 is quite usable.
Games are different kettle of fish to things like Picasa and CS2, but we can dream, right?
CodeWeavers also maintain CrossOver for Mac (which is also based on Wine), a way to run Windows games straight from within Mac OS X. Any improvements to Wine will hopefully be of benefit to CrossOver.
