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First Release Candidate of Wine 1.0 Released
moronikos writes to mention that the first release candidate of Wine 1.0 was announced and released into the wild today. This new version includes only bug fixes as the team is in a code freeze while pushing for the full 1.0 release.
"Why would I want to use Wine when I can just run windows in a virtual machine?"
:)
You don't have a lot of spare RAM? (e.g. using VirtualBox requires enough RAM for the host OS + the RAM for the virtualized OS + the RAM for the app running in it; with Wine you eliminate the need for the virtualized OS)
You don't want to buy a Windows license/pirate Windows for a single app? (or more generally, you don't want Microsoft code on your system if you can help it?
Well, yeah, it depends on what you need, doesn't it? What you say is true for many, maybe even most people, but that doesn't mean nobody needs Wine.
:)
If you have to interoperate with Windows users who use specific software, and the Linux equivalents can't read/write files from that software sufficiently well for your purposes, then you may still find yourself looking for a way to run the Windows programs. This used to be the case a lot with MS Office; modern Linux office apps are pretty good at interoperating, so it's not an issue so much, though there are still a few rare cases where the Linux software won't be able to duplicate what MS Office does quite well enough. (Complex VBA macros that automate other Windows applications, for example. Though I don't know offhand whether Wine can handle those either, and frankly anyone who uses them deserves the pain they cause
Then there are the cases where the Linux programs are genuinely inferior. Again it's a question of whether that actually matters. For example, GIMP is good enough for most casual users and even many professionals, but still a lot of people are inevitably going to find there are things they need that it doesn't do, and then they're going to want a way to run Photoshop.
And finally we have the fundamental matter of freedom of choice. Some people just prefer various proprietary Windows applications, and it's good that they can have the freedom to choose to retain those, even if the Linux equivalent would work just as well. Linux is all about the freedom to use your computer how you like, after all!
I am not familiar with MAME, but the other you mention are emulators, in that they perform byte-code interpreting of the program code (I guess MAME does too). Wine does not, it only provides an ABI-compatible implementation of (most of) the WIN32 API.
If Wine would be an emulator, it would run equally well on PowerPC or SPARC hardware. It does not, you need the exact same hardware that the original program was intended for.
Finally, for the semantically pedantic: yes, recent versions of Dosbox also have a "dynamic" execution mode which tries to do the same that wine does. Naturally, it only works when running Dosbox on x86-compatible hardware.
I don't know the answer to your question, but I can tell you this: Anybody with a strong opinion on the matter is full of shit.
After all, I am strangely colored.