Mass Effect 2 Demo and Wine: Getting there...

Am I a stubborn guy or what? I read a little bit about the issues and possible fix when I saw this forum discussion and a possible mouse hack patch for an older version of Wine (1.1.x). Here is the original patch.

I poked through the dinput.dll code and figured I should be updating the patch. I am 100% sure WineHq will not be accepting mouse hacks into their source so I don't think it will be of any good to submit it (Let me know otherwise).

Here is the patch From Pastebin With Love.

Nothing changed...

I suppose my Xorg version is too old. Compiling this new wine version didn't do anything at all.

Backporting Wine with Xinput2

I had problems backporting wine (still 1.3.33) with xinput 2. It seems to be what is called the Xmd.h inclusion bug (conflicting datatype declarations) and after a bit of reading, I couldn't make sense why this wouldn't work now. After digging up and trying to run the make on winex11drv to see what was happening, it turns out it's missing the libXext package. I slipped that in and everything built just fine. Now to see how mouse support is going.

Mouse woes with Mass Effect 2

It's a pretty well-documented problem. I've read that Xinput2 should have the proper extensions for mouse tracking which is at the heart of this issue. DirectX uses relative mouse movements while Xorg supports only absolute mouse movements.

Hopefully by installing the update to libxi (and others) proper mouse support can finally happen. Playing Mass Effect 2 with the mouse glitch and manually recentering the mouse cursor is not fun.

Sims 3 Teaser with Wine Direct Sound Test

I did a quick test to see if the scratchy audio in Sims 3 Teaser would disappear by forcing the default sample rate and default bits I used in Mass Effect 2 and that didn't work.

Mass Effect 2 Demo and Wine

So I had installed the demo of Mass Effect 2 via Winetricks. The game played rather smoothly except for the lack of sound. I checked Wine's appdb section to see what could be done about it. They gave a good tip that solved some of the issues by running the actual exe file instead of using the Mass Effect 2 launcher. This played the sound but I was getting buffer underrun issues. This made the audio stutter horribly causing the game to run very slowly.

After much research, I had found the basic solution to the problem, which is to set the Wine DirectSound to use 44100Hz default sample rate and 16-bit default bits. For reference, this is what I came up with:

[Software\\Wine\\DirectSound]

"DefaultBitsPerSample"="16"

"DefaultSampleRate"="44100"

"EmulDriver"="N"

"HardwareAcceleration"="Full"

I'm thinking that this could be how I get rid of the scratchy sound issues I get with Sims 3 Teaser but that test is for another day.

The Nintendo Wii - DS Connection

I had a previous blog post about how the Gamecube and GBA connectivity was severely underused but had tremendous potential. It's something that I had hoped the Wii and DS could pick up and really take to the next level but with the system nearing its death for the Wii U, it looks like this is about it. I figured I'd put the spotlight on the one game that I think took this particular feature and implemented it really well, Driver: San Francisco.

Driver: San Francisco seemed to be an incredibly multiplayer-oriented game and surprisingly, it's not really touted all that much. A second player can pop in and out to provide some support via an extra aiming reticule but what seals this multiplayer package is the intricate gamplay provided by the DS connectivity.

With the DS, you can provide support by stunning AI cars as well as put up blockades. You also get a map to help figure out routes and look for objectives in the current map. Here's a basic rundown of the feature as well as how to get it working.

Start the story mode, turn on the DS and go to download play. Driver: San Francisco should show up and tapping it will download the software.

The DS player gets a few gameplay options:

1. City Map where you can view cops location as well as points of interest.
2. Roadblock deployment. This allows the player to drop police roadblocks, but you cannot deploy it too close to Tanner.
3. Mission Support. Depending on the mission, you are able to stun enemy cars.
4. Felony hacking to drop the felony levels of the Wii player.

You can check out more by heading to this excellent article from Wired.

I figured I'd also give a definitive run down on games that do support this feature.

Guitar Hero 5 / Warriors of Rock /Band Hero (Here, Here and Here)

Mii Channel with My Personal Trainer: Walking (Here, Here and Here)

Pokemon Battle Revolution with Pokemon: Pearl and Diamond (Here and Here)

Castlevania Judgment with Castlevania Order of Ecclesia (Here)

My Pokemon Ranch with DS Connectivity (Here)

Animal Crossing City Folk with Animal Crossing: Wild World (Here)

DS Download Service (Here)

My Word Coach (Here)

Naruto Shippuden Ryujinki and Naruto: Shinobi Rumble - This is ONLY for the Japanese version! (Here and Here)

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time for both the Wii and DS games (Here)

Geometry Wars: Galaxies for both Wii and DS (Here and Here)

Big Beach Sports (Here)

Batman: Brave and the Bold for the Wii and DS (Here)

Ultimate Band (Here)

Jam with the Band (Here)

At the end of the road, we only have a few games that use this feature. I hope this article can help those who want to find games that utilize this unique and incredible feature. The original forum thread discussion I had can be found here.

Sims 3 Wii - Fire Hazard Glitch

This is a note on the fire hazard glitch when playing Sims 3 Wii Edition. If you buy the house and lot of the villa at the corner right area of the map, the game automatically jacks up the fire hazard up to half and there is no real way of bringing it down, even if you sell every little damn thing. The game will eventually put the fire hazard meter to maximum after a few seconds and all the pieces of furniture will put the meter over. The next item you attempt to buy will result in an error message that tells you that you've broken multiple fire codes and triggers a fire outbreak.

If you buy a blank lot and attempt to pick the luxurious house art styles, you will get the glitch as well. I'm not sure which ones but the Adobe Estate and Desert Retreat styles definitely exhibit this problem. The Trailer Home style doesn't trigger this glitch. I have attempted to buy furnished versions of Deco Elegance and Habitable Lighthouse and haven't gotten problems.

False alarm!

For some reason, I decided to reboot the computer to see what would happen. The scratchy audio went away. Phew!

Wine Pulse Audio Regression

This is an awful regression. Wine now has very horrible scratchy sound and it's very annoying. This could not have come at a worse time with the Star Wars beta.

Backports done!

I left the building overnight as Firefox8 didn't seem very fast to build. When I did install it, I managed to get through a few quirks in the install. It's some dependency on installed packages that were about to be overwritten anyway, so I added packages to install until dpkg didn't complain anymore. Here are the ones I added:

• firefox
• firefox-3.5
• firefox-3.5-branding
• firefox-3.5-gnome-support
• firefox-gnome-support
• firefox-branding

Firefox 8 is running here on Karmic. I went ahead and updated firebug as well. This is sweet!

1 down, 1 to go...

Thankfully, yasm-1 was not a pain to backport. I checked the versions and it was fine. Building only took a minute or so and now Firefox8 is building. We'll see how that goes.

Ack! More backporting!

Man, one website that I use for work has decided to block me from using it because my browsers are too old. Google Chrome doesn't seem to support Ubuntu 9.10 and Firefox is just too old. I'm not a fan of downloading Firefox from the website if I can get the deb packages to work. I think you know where this is heading.

Yes, I decided to yank Firefox8 from the launchpad ppa and do my own backporting to Karmic. You can get the packages I used here. I did the usual to prep up my build machine and I also double checked the control files just to make sure nothing was wrong. I thought the versions of the libraries was fine and hoped this would be a painless exercise, but that wasn't to be.

Building the deb package, I realized that apt-get build-dep for Karmic missed out the following.

• libcurl4-openssl-dev
• xvfb
• imagemagick
• yasm-1 (>= 1.1)

The three of them I could install just fine, but I found yasm-1 to be an oddity as I'm pretty sure yasm packages were built without the -1 suffix. I decided to take the risk and build it too hoping it's not too much of a big deal. We'll see how that goes.

Wine backport 1.3.33 Notes

I did a backport using the oneirc package that is available on Launchpad here's a few things I noticed:

1. ttf-symbol-replacement-wine1.3 has been removed.
2. wine package doesn't seem to be requiring gcc4.
3. removed oss4-dev (just like the last time).
4. changed debhelper version from 7 to 5.

Seems to be working well. Will be doing more tests.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Hmm... beta testing, eh? Interesting times. :)

Even better solution - ICONV!

Well, that was fast. I figured a better way of dealing with this. Codepage 936 is Simplified Chinese and BIG5 is the traditional one.

iconv -f cp936 -t utf-8 chsimplified.srt >& simplified.srt

iconv -f cn-big5 -t utf-8 chtraditional.srt >& traditional.srt

These will convert the codepage subtitles to utf-8 which is something Ubuntu (and mplayer) can figure out much better. Now to back up these subs!

Subtitles Mayhem - Finally Solved!

God damn it! This has taken a long time to figure out! I was trying to get Chinese subtitles to work on mplayer and everytime I tried it, I get crazy garbage text. After installing truck load of language packs on Ubuntu, I am not successful. One guy suggested loading up specific a codepage for the subtitles but I had no clue what the encoding was for my srt subtitles.

After taking a couple of months break from it, I decided to start looking again and this time, I lucked out. Someone suggested to use smplayer instead for the subtitles and it only took a few clicks on the preferences to make it work. I changed the fonts on the preferences to use Code Page 936 Simplified Chinese for the subtitles. Voila! Subtitles are appearing there!

Unfortunately, I tried to use it on mplayer, I still get garbage text. Whatever. As long as I can read the subtitles, I'm fine.

DCUO Update

Okay, this game is completely unplayable by the mere fact that it keeps crashing outside of Gotham Police Station. Well, if anything, I can at least send some messages to my buddy there.

DC Universe Online

I'll keep this very brief. DCUO has just gone Free to Play and seeing as one of my buddies is so addicted into this game he doesn't even go online on chat anymore. I tried my hand and saw if the game worked on Wine.

Basically, the winehq entry says it works and I simply followed the instructions to install ie8, xact and vcrun2005 using winetricks. The installer is freely available on DCUO's website and it only installs a launchpad program that will grab the actual game. For the most part, the installer installs all other prerequisites like flash. When the installer runs, it fails in Wine dropping into the debugger, but this didn't stop the installer from proceeding. I guess no harm done.

I had a problem with the launchpad program because it wouldn't get me the actual login. The forums discussion on it helps a lot as it told me to edit the Launchpad-user.ini to add the 'curtain=disable' setting.

One 14.1 GB download later, the game is up and running. The mouse implementation is pretty bad, but otherwise, it runs fine. I'm not sure if it's a Wine issue or a game issue, but be warned when playing.

Anyway, it seems like a generic MMO with lots of killing. *Yawn*

Funny thing about Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

I've been playing a lot of Splinter Cell games lately. Something funny came to mind and I thought I'd share it.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory on the DS features multiplayer modes Shadownet vs Mercs and Coop. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory on the Gamecube features only a Coop multiplayer mode. Splinter Cell 3D (3DS remake of Chaos Theory) has no multiplayer.

What an interesting case of de-evolution!

A few short notes on the backport of Wine

Before I forget, there were a few nuances with the packages I backported (into Karmic) from the Wine PPA site that Scott Ritchie provided (for Maverick and other Ubuntu releases).

Firstly, the orig tar gzipped file had wine folder name while the diff expected wine1.3 which is the release name. I had to repackage the orig.tar.gz file to use wine1.3 folder name.

On the control file, I had to deal with debhelper version checking which I'm pretty sure is caused by the new Ubuntu releases moving to newer versions of files. I saw two other new items, gcc-4.5-multilib and oss4-dev of which I removed as dependency. I'm fairly certain that Wine will compile on old GCC 3.x so, the requirement of GCC 4 looked a little silly from my point of view. I don't plan to release the package to the masses anyway, so it won't hurt anybody but me.

Final touches, I updated the changelog also to reflect karmic version numbering and then removed the reference CC="gcc-4.5" on the rules file to avoid forcing GCC 4 when building. Everything built fine and wine is running well after packaging and installing.

Sims 3 Teaser Update!

I'm going to keep this very brief. I've basically updated to 1.3.29 and boy it really eliminated most of the graphical glitches on the game. It basically runs very well although it still gets some minor culling problems. Works very well!

The Sims 3 Teaser on Wine

When EA unveiled a Sims 3 demo that could run on your browser through the Gaikai service, I thought it was a great way to provide cross-platform Sims gaming. After all, the Sims Social facebook game was utter piece of crap. I figured I'd give this game a go to see how everything worked, but as it turns out Gaikai deemed my area too far from their data centers. I guess that was it as far as running it from a browser went. Time for plan B on playing Sims 3.

I checked out EA's online store Origin and discovered there that if you have Origin setup on your computer (please guys, read the Terms and Conditions for some nasty I surrender my PC to EA banter), you can add the game to your account and download the actual teaser. Sweet.

I did try to install Origin on Wine (version 1.3.11) but everytime I tried to log in, Origin would say 'Login Failed'. That did not work the way I had hoped for sure. The only sure fire way to get Origin to work was install it on my throwaway XP box and I managed to get the 2.5 GB download there. It was time to plan on how to transfer the game into Wine, so I started poking through the innards to figure out how it could be done.

Basically, the idea is to fool the game into thinking that it is installed with all the proper registry entries slipped in. To perform this surgical operation, I exported several registry entries out of my XP box. Look at "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software" and grab the following keys:

• EA Play
• Electronic Arts
• Origin Games
• Origin

As far as I could tell, the rest are either miscellaneous or not related at all. Truth be told, I wasn't entirely sure that the registry entries are necessary, but I used them anyway. Aside from the registry entries, I also snagged these folders off my XP box and dropped them into my Wine virtual drive.

• C:\Program Files\Origin Games\The Sims 3 Teaser
• C:\Program Files\Common Files\EAInstaller

After putting these into the proper install paths, I tried to run the game on a 1024x768 virtual desktop and although the game didn't immediately complain about install corruption, it was complaining about msvcrt80. To fix this, I ran 'winetricks vcrun2005' to make wine install the proper libraries. I imagine that installing 'vcrun2005sp1' would be a better idea though.

The end result is that the game did run, albeit not perfectly. There's very apparent problems with the Z-buffering rendering causing the game to cull incorrectly. Several objects were de-rendered incorrectly causing Sims to turn temporarily invisible. Tweaking the OffScreenRenderingMode on Wine Direct3D settings to FBO did not help either. On the Wine console debug printing, I see plenty of Stencil Buffer errors and fixmes so this is definitely a Wine deficiency.

The next step I plan to do is to update my Wine libraries to 1.3.29 and hope for the best. I will post back results as soon as I have them.

GOG Broken Sword: Shadows of the Templars Director's Cut Promo

If you haven't checked it out and play a ton of point and click adventure games, this is your chance to check out this cool promo courtesy of GOG. The site is celebrating 6 million unique game downloads as a special milestone. The prize, as you may have guessed it, is that you'll be able to get Broken Swmrd: Shadows of the Templar Director's Cut for free. The special offer is valid until October 1, 2011 (11:59 am GMT), so head over and grab it now!

Milestone achieved! Free Broken Sword for everyone!

Now is an interesting time to compare Broken Sword: Director's Cut on the PC, Wii and the DS. The Wii and the DS versions I finished some time back!

My Journey to the Tablet World

Recently I got an Acer Iconia Tab A500 tablet and I've been meaning to get one of those fancy mobile internet devices for myself. I've always had a plan to unstrap myself on the computer chair for all the online tasks I demand. This idea spawned from using the Zaurus SL-5600 for a good year or so and while the machine was mostly insufficient for even for simple browsing, it was a brief glimpse into this vision of being online anywhere, everywhere. I had thought of several options, from netbooks to perhaps another laptop, but I knew this was not the optimum solution. I owned a laptop for many years now, and it has not particularly been portable. Of course, it weighed a ton, which did nothing to help the situation.

When I saw what tablets could do, it did not even strike me to use it, but I suppose the interest grew and as I evaluated the propositions, I started to see some value in them. They were many times more easier to interface with, and the wifi connectivity was very good. The biggest trouble I have ever had with my Zaurus was simply running out of memory and that problem seemed to crop up at every turn with it. Even using my brother's mobile phone to surf the web was an exacting experience. While analyzing modern tablets, I saw this problem didn't even exist and that was a very important key to this. It seemed to be the natural solution of what I was after.

Selecting the Acer Iconia had then become weighing through different options. The plan was to get a proper ssh client and VNC viewer so that I could still do some work while away from my office that I had become so entrenched in. The next step was to have very good Google services support seeing that I was almost embedded into Google's ecosystem. Everything else was gravy as far as I was concerned. It had to be an Android, and the price had to be reasonable.

At first, I was interested in one of those Chinese knock offs, Wopad. The i7 builds seem to solve much of the processing power issues the first editions had. Its price was also extremely attractive but shouldn't really be a surprise judging that it does come from China. But, there was something about it that I just couldn't get around to. It was support. You'd be getting this neat device for a couple of hundred dollars cheaper than the regular tablets, but what happens when you have problems? Who do you go to? Don't know? I thought so.

Chopping those cheap ones off put the choices down to Samsung's offering as well as Acer's and Asus'. All three are pretty good machines, though I found the Galaxy tabs here to be much older models and those definitely did not attract. Asus meanwhile seemed to be a tad bit more expensive than Acer's proposition and what I got from it was much, much less. Acer it is, and to this day, I'm quite happy with it.

For the most part, I've read that the Acer Iconia Tab is a pretty hefty device, but since I haven't handled much in terms of tablets, I did not have any preconceived notion of just what was light. I got around the weight issues pretty quickly and settled in on the device. Having a capacitive touch screen display was an eye opener as the last quasi-tablet I handled was Toshiba's ultra portable with a resistive touch screen. It ran on Windows and it was such a pain to use. This tablet's touch screen was very sensitive and at times seemed too much to handle. The availability of a full-sized USB port also made some of the transition very easy, allowing me to plug in flash drives and transferring files. Overall I was pleased, but it was not all rosy with this.

Software seemed to be the biggest issue with Android. Going through Android's Market was like entering a flea market and you just never know what you get. There's a lot of stuff, and a lot of it, you don't really know if you'll ever need. Some of the stuff just simply does not work and it would be ideal if Google could separate the glitchy apps from the stable ones. Perhaps they haven't because surprisingly, Google Docs is one of those crazy malfunctioning apps. It pains me to have to work with this and Android's crappy soft keyboard. I was on the verge of screaming for directional keys as the cursor would almost always jump too far with the touch screen. For those who had those problems, pickup the Hacker's keyboard. It's a god-send for me and it made the app much more bearable. It also works great on my ssh client, ConnectBot (I think), which allowed tab support (Yippee!). Google Docs had even more issues though, with the cursor not being aligned to where the letters were going to show up. I hope that this is going to get sorted soon.

Games are also absolutely nothing to write about here. Acer's tablet came with Hero of Sparta, Let's Golf and Need for Speed: Shift and the only game worthwhile there is EA's work. I was very skeptical with NFS, tilt racing, but the end result is surprisingly natural. The game also looks very good for portable devices. The other game that really shone for me was Galaxy on Fire 2, which had that Freelancer kind of feel, if you want some space flight sim-ish game. The virtual control stick is just awful for mining though it may just require more time to adjust. I really wanted to try Nova 2 from Gameloft but their site seems to keep me from downloading any trial version. Speaking of trial, I also wanted to get Riptide GP demo, but it just wasn't around at all. To wrap up the disappointment, I really wanted Sims 3 and it seemed that the Android Market just refuses to list the game down for me.

Other apps that were very useful for me were ES File Explorer as this allowed me to access my Samba file server and pull up mp3s, videos and pdfs. It was very good and the interface was very nice. VNC Viewer I used was called android-vnc-viewer and while it works well, it is kind of unstable especially when I try to touch the display with more than one finger (for some reason). Using it needs some getting used to, but it works and that's all that matters for me.

Lastly, there's this thing about syncing back to a desktop. I read about being able to connect to Ubuntu and after taking much consideration, I figured that the mtpfs drivers that were used to interface with the device should be mature enough but the support libraries in Karmic were just too old. I decided to just use my XP Virtualbox install and expose the tablet to it. For some reason, I have to turn off USB debugging on my tablet to get the entire setup working, but it did work. I manage to copy stuff into and out of the device and that works just fine for me.

Tablets do address specific needs and I can certainly understand that better now. It isn't for everyone, but if you're looking for some robust online device on the go, then look no further.

Expansion Slide Pad - What the hell?

Famitsu just spilled the beans on a new Nintendo 3DS slide pad contraption that adds buttons and a second stick for the 3DS. It is nothing short of monstrous to look at and even worse, it will likely fragment the market of the 3DS to those who own one and those who don't. What was Nintendo thinking when they were doing this? I have no fucking clue.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory DS Glitches

I've been blasting through the game a second time around and just wanted to post a few quick thoughts. The first one is really annoying because on my second playthrough, I've been trying to unlock the bonus outfits and everytime I get one, I lose it when I shut the DS off. It's very annoying but I guess nothing I can do about that.

The second glitch is the damn Manhattan Streets bug that causes a mission failure when you climb up the crates to get to the main streets to Zherkezhi's apartment. It's only now that I realize that there's an internal time limit as someone actually dies around the six or seven minute mark and counts as a civilian kill. Strangely enough the check for mission failure happens exactly at the moment Sam climbs the crates. That's how some people trigger the glitch and result in mission failure. I only happened to figure this out while playing on the DSi XL. You'll hear the sound effect of someone getting hit with a sticky shocker as background noise. If you get that sound before you climb the crates, you will stumble into the glitch. If you get the noise while the cutscene between Lambert and Sam is playing, you will get through the mission just fine. So, in short, to pass this glitch, you just need to play the level as fast as you can.

Thoughts on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory DS

I finally got through this game and it sure is a respectable port though it definitely has some serious issues. It's tough to get around with the frame rate issues and the overly complicated controls, but if you find yourself forgiving enough, you might stumble upon some fun in it.

From a controls point of view, it's bad enough that the game demands you use the entire DS for just about everything. It's really difficult to wrap your mind around controlling Sam Fisher on it and being a lefty makes things even worse. Unfortunately for us lefties, the game is only designed for right-handed players. Controlling the camera while moving Sam was a chore. Eventually, I figured something workable for me. By placing the thumb strap (remember that from the old DS?) on the index finger of my right hand, I could manipulate the camera like using a touchpad of a laptop while having the stylus ready with my left hand for the lock picking parts. Fortunately, because Splinter Cell is a deliberately slow-paced game, having to change gripping positions for camera and the action buttons doesn't penalize me.

Having that out of the way though doesn't put you in the clear. There's so many game glitches and the frame rate is very atrocious. The game even refuses to save on the final checkpoint of the game! All annoyance aside, I had a good time with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory but I certainly wouldn't recommend this game for purchase. Rent this game first before deciding!

It's fixed! libGL confusion!

After some searching, I began to understand the nature of the problem more. Basically, the build-dep pulled in a truck load of libraries for me to build Wine and one of them slipped this in:

/usr/lib/mesa/libGL.so.1.2

nvidia has their own libGL.so.1 that sits in /usr/lib but no matter what I did, ldconfig insists on using the latest version (and gets it wrong) by asserting the use of the mesa one. So, even though nvidia starts up just fine, the library it's using is wrong. That means that I don't get the hardware acceleration at all. Lesson learned.

For now, I created a .usr_lib_mesa folder and dumped libGL.so.1.2 in it so that if I ever need it, I can put it back. But immediately after removing it and having ldconfig rebuild, everything has been fine. The games run and glxinfo is now reporting what it needs to.

Goodness!

Credit to this post.

Oops! Black Screen of Death!

I didn't realize how much my build-dep istall messed up my system until after a reboot when I was greeted by a black screen with a mouse pointer after logging in from GDM. It took a while to figure out what exactly happened and I've also read people blaming PulseAudio for their cases.

Mine, as it turns out, is a different issue. It seems that after all the installing and backporting of Wine, Compiz broke down and everytime I try to start it up, it goes to a black screen. I was ever a huge fan of Compiz/Beryl because the desktop effects just seems useless to me. I was able to fix it by going to Failsafe Gnome Session and then selecting the appearance not to use any desktop effects. I may go around to looking at why Compiz broke, but as for now, I'm just happy to get my desktop back.

Update:
It seems that it's much more serious than I thought. My nvidia drivers, even though they are loading up fine, is not giving me direct rendering. Going to try and install the latest nvidia-glx to see if it helps...

Wine and Pulse Audio Update

Backporting a newer version of wine right now... and I bumped into a problem with mpg123 because of the 32-bit vs 64-bit references on /usr/include/mpg123.h.

I'm using the patch from this thread to get around that and I'm using the packages provided by Rune Svendsen to build this.

UPDATE:

It works! Running a game without having to use the Pulse Audio wrapper is a good thing. Begs to question why Ubuntu did not include the WinePulse patches in their releases.

Fixing Wine and Pulse Audio

Well, I'm pretty much fed up with Pulse Audio. I'm not sure why Ubuntu ever went this route when it has caused so much audio incompatibilities with applications and games. Hacker Evolution: Untold and Trine are just a few games that lose all sound with this audio system and there's pretty much nothing I can do about it. (Side note: Cogs works splendidly well and it's a very good indie game).

After reading about winepulse, I'm about ready to backport some newer Wine versions with WinePulse integrated in it. We'll see how it goes, and hopefully everything works fine.

Steam Servers Are Too Busy...

Recently, I received a guest pass for a game on Steam which is certainly a welcome surprise (Thanks Anton!). As you may or may not know, Steam's guest pass allows recipients to play the full retail game for a couple of days. In this case, I have 3 days (I think!) to play this new title.

Fire up Steam, and I immediately jumped into this deal, but as I tried to download the game, I noticed something woeful. Each time I tried to install it, I get Steam Servers are too busy. Okay, so maybe after a few minutes. Again, I get this problem. Hmm...

As it turned out, I had spent the entire morning trying to grab the game, compounded by:

1. Steam Servers are too busy errors...
2. Steam freezing on me...
3. My internet disconnecting.

Steam was kind enough to explain to me that the license expiration begins the moment I enable the guest pass key. Splendid. Now, I get to try and download this game and if I'm lucky, I might get a minute of play out of it. What a great deal!

Programming 101 Note

I've had the displeasure of having to sift through someone else's code and trying to fix some really serious kinds of bugs that has spawned from very, very poor programming practices. I've dealt with this code structure many times in the source and I just really want to vent out.

Code like the one below should not be tolerated at all times.

try {

//some code here.

} catch { }

Please, if you're a programmer, DO NOT DO THIS!

Don King's Prizefighter: Joe Calzaghe vs Buster Dog

For a couple of times, I've played as Joe Calzaghe on Don King's Prizefighter and fought some boxers like Chris Eubanks and Andre Berto, for the most part without encountering much trouble nor resistance. I then began to think about seeing how I'd do against my overpowered boxers. Naturally, that meant Joe Calzaghe vs Buster Dog at hard difficulty.

I brought everything I learned from the Andrew Golota fight into this bout, defending smart and moving away when I get in trouble. Also, I decided to give my game plan a little tweak here and there. Normally I'd throw plenty of body jabs to hurt and stiffle the opponent's offensive, but that did not work well in stopping Buster's assault. For this fight, I decided to try and throw more body hooks instead as they are more damaging than the jabs and straights.

At the first round, the speed and power that Buster brought to the table was immediately felt. He got some good combinations in but I kept moving and throwing body hooks. As the round went on, I realized that the hooks were good weapons in stopping his punches. It allowed me to stun him on multiple occasions and really wear him out. It was at this moment that I thought that the fight was pretty much it.

When round two started, Buster quickly reminded me this wasn't the end yet, with him losing none of that speed and power that made him dangerous. I could not put together a better offense here and was at one point, in trouble of getting knocked down. Fortunately, I was able to knock him down to get an otherwise closely contested round.

After that scare, I wasn't going to ease up on him. I made sure to stay diligently on offense and defense. Everytime I put him down however, he just got up, showing no signs of ever slowing down.

By round seven, I was contemplating that the fight was going to go all twelve rounds, as Buster just kept at it and I kept chipping at him, hurting him as much as I could. When the knockdown came, I realized that Buster was finished. The ten count came and I had finally knocked him out.

It was still a tough fight but nowhere on edge like the Golota fight was. Buster is always dangerous if you give him a chance to hit you. This time, I was more than prepared to face him.

Fahrenheit Post-Install stuff...

Well, after playing around with the game, I noticed a couple of things. First is that the dialog cuts like five or six seconds too early. This seems to be something to do with the game's internal timer because the conversations are spoken at a normal pace. Second is that at 1024x768, the game does slow down, making things pretty annoying when trying to interact with objects in the game. I bumped down the resolution to 800x600 which makes the game run perfectly. The last thing is that I changed the Fahrenheit bottle to be the default bottle and that has made the Desktop emulation option on winecfg take effect.

I'm pretty much set and have gone through a couple of chapters so it's been fun overall.

Playing Fahrenheit on CrossOver Games 8 (Lame Duck) on Ubuntu 9.10 (without Windows!)

I liked Atari's Fahrenheit when I played it years back, so I was delighted to see that wine's support for it was pretty much good. As usual with wine, it's not quite as straightforward as popping the disc and everything will pan out right. As it turned out, the winehq app database entry for Fahrenheit stresses the need to install the version 1.1 patch for the game and the No-CD patch for everything to work. No-CD patching is really the norm with Wine as copy protection simply doesn't work at all and no, you're not going to find links to that in this article!

Installing

Installing turned out to be a breeze with CrossOver Games 8 but we still need to update the game. Patching to 1.1 seems like not much of a big deal but apparently Wine support for the MSP file format is pretty dodgy right now and the 1.1 patch only comes in the MSP format (I think it's used in msiexec). I didn't like the proposed idea of installing Fahrenheit to Windows and patching it there, so I thought of another way to get this thing running.

Over this link, I figured that using another application to extract the MSP package was the next option. The program MsiX seems to do this relatively fine, so I grabbed the patch and extracted the Patch to see its contents.

$ <$CX_install>/bin/wine --bottle Sample MsiX.exe "Fahrenheit Patch1_1.msp" /out outdir

In case you're wondering, outdir is the target directory where MsiX will dump everything. CrossOver Games extracted it without any problems at all. In this directory, you'll see three files, #QPPrev1ToQPNewVersion, QPPrev1ToQPNewVersion, and PCW_CAB_Family00. The only file we're really looking for is PCW_CAB_Family00 which is a cabinet (.cab) file. With this we simply run cabextract!

$ cabextract PCW_CAB_Family00

Extracting cabinet: PCW_CAB_Family00

extracting fahrenheit.exe

extracting bytecode.btc

All done, no errors.

The Fahrenheit patch only has two files, the executable and a file called bytecode.btc. It's fairly obvious that the executable here is copy-protected so, that's not much of any help here. The file bytecode.btc contains updated information that should be copied to C:\Program Files\Atari\Fahrenheit\obj\BYTECODE.BTC. Once you overwrite the bytecode.btc file as well as apply the correct No-CD patch (as advised in the winehq database entry), you should get a patched version of Fahrenheit.

PulseAudio

CrossOver Games 8 has big problems with pulseaudio and its bloody annoying as the game audio stutters badly and the game freezes as soon as Lucas leaves the restroom of the diner! I scoured the net for information on this and came up with padsp which is an OSS wrapper to PulseAudio. So to get the audio working fine, I had to run the games with the OSS wrapper plus set the audio drivers to OSS.

$ padsp sh -c <$CX_install>/bin/cxsetup

This will run the CrossOver Games configuration Window, and from there you can get to the control panel for your Fahrenheit bottle and configure the Audio tab on winecfg. To run the game, I had to wrap it with padsp as well.

$ padsp sh -c <$CX_install>/bin/fahrenheit

The game should run now without problems. It goes full screen and I'm not sure why, but at least the game doesn't freeze and the audio doesn't stutter anymore. Next part is to revisit the game!

Official Site for the Game

TCL Code to convert Empathy Chat Logs to HTML

I have had it with Empathy and to completely sever my dependence to this Instant Messenger, I had written a TCL code to convert the chat log to something Pidgin finds easier to handle.

Please note that this script is in a very rough form and I cannot stress enough to BACKUP YOUR DATA. I've seen a couple of minor bugs but I think it should convert the messages just fine. This will delete the old log files after processing them, so please remember to BACKUP YOUR DATA.

THIS SCRIPT IS OFFERED AS IS WITH NO EXPLICIT NOR IMPLICIT GUARANTEES IT WILL WORK. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Without further ado... TCL Script

UPDATE: And now, forced to backport Pidgin for Karmic

After some time of tolerating Empathy on Karmic, I have finally had enough of this. The app just does not get updates and I'm experiencing MSN frustrations with it as buddies do not appear when they do on Pidgin.

As it turns out, Pidgin is outdated on Karmic so, I am once again forced to cut myself my own release of Pidgin. This gets really boring after a while, but hopefully I can now get video and voice on Pidgin compiled to see how that goes.

Update: It's done. 2.7.10 on my Karmic. I had a few complications but nothing show-stopping. Libtools was complaining and I did this:

autoreconf --force

Git sucks...

For a while I've been using cvs and then moved to subversion for my programming needs. Two years ago, give or take... the team I work with decided to move to Git and it's been a love/hate relationship ever since.

For the most part, every time I try to use git's much praised branching abilities have been met with tragic consequences. For the past year, I've kept an ultra conservative work style with git that has worked for me for the most part.

Lately, I've been trying to expand the work to use more of git and like always, it's been a real pain. This much touted feature on branching has always, and I emphasize always, lead me to conflict resolutions even if the files I have a conflict to resolve does not involve any of the commits from other programmers. As the branch I create get more complicated, the more time I spend trying to merge the work I do with the current code snapshot. This is utterly stupid.

It does not end there. Git seems to literally drop what it's doing when coming across errors while moving to a new remote branch creating a totally weird branch snapshot. I've had years worth of commits disappear in the source tree I'm working on leaving me wondering what the hell just happened. Then I have to roll up my sleeves and try to fix the mess that git left behind.

Git works when I am just trying to code something and commit. Anything else, it's been a tragic mess. Git sucks... for me.

Just backported Pidgin 2.7.9 on... Gutsy!

I find it very funny that I'm too freaking lazy to upgrade my Ubuntu install on my Acer laptop. It's stuck on Gutsy Gibbon which is really ages ago. When MSN stopped working, I just knew eventually I would have to roll up my sleeves and cut myself a custom release.

I got the pidgin source packages from Ubuntu Natty (I believe) and rebuilt the damn thing. What is impressive is that it's taken me a very short time to get this working. I took painstaking time rebuilding dependencies of Pidgin for my previous backporting effort so it seems that the pidgin releases match those dependencies more.

I only fixed the control files to match the versions I have and changes compat to 4 (5 will probably work). Then on rules, I disabled video and voice (I am so not going to backport the gstreamer libraries!).

A couple of minutes later, I have pidgin 2.7.9 on Gutsy and it's worked like a charm.

Death of a Zaurus

For these past few months, I have found a way to make my Zaurus SL-5600 more useful than it has been for a while. The bulky mp3 player that has a measly 1 GB CF card and a wifi CF card couldn't get me to surf websites without low memory errors, much less surf for more than an hour or so. As I've managed to get my mind wrapped around mobile devices and the internet, I've found ways around them.

My Zaurus is also my mobile device for grabbing e-mails and serves as a repository for my contacts and it is sad to say that it is now gone. It would not turn on and no matter how I tried to resurrect it, it was not meant to be.

Fortunately, I am very happy to own a Nintendo DSi which serves as a better online mobile device for the simple reason of having better battery life. The Zaurus is a powerful little device, and one that I will surely miss.

Don King's Prizefighter: Andrew Golota vs Buster Dog

A couple of hours ago, I entertained the thought of giving myself an interesting bout on Don King's Prizefighter for the DS. For most of my time playing the game, I've used my created boxer, Buster Dog to mow down the opposition. Being the strongest boxer in the game with decent skills overall, I figured it would be more interesting this time around if the tables were turned against me. Specifically, a boxer of my choosing versus Buster Dog.

In choosing the boxer I would use, I wanted to use one who would have very standard statistics if not underpowered in comparison to this fictional boxer. Once I bumped into Andrew Golota and checked the statistics 2k had given him, I knew the match was set.

It would be Andrew Golota vs Buster Dog, 12 rounds in the Trump Taj Mahal. I set the difficulty to 'Hard' knowing that using any boxer other than my customized ones, it would provide an interesting challenge.

When the first round came, I was in for some highly intense combinations and I did not expect anything less. Buster Dog gave me all I could chew and then more. None of my punches would hurt and he would slip in some slick combinations that left Golota stunned for most of the round. I made a critical error in trying to beat him to the punch thinking my jabs would disrupt his attacks opening up some combinations. Suffice to say that I paid the price dearly with one knockdown in his favour.

Much of the opening two rounds were the same as I tried to figure out what I could do to stop this monster from completely annihilating me. Eventually I started to find my own rhythm, fighting much smarter and moving away when I could. I believe it was the third round that I manage to get a knockdown of my own, a clear sign that this was going to be a war.

I tried to fight as smart as I could and learned a few more as I went to deeper waters. Buster was not slowing down in spite of the two knockdowns I have given him. There were rare instances where I hurt him bad enough to see him cover up, but many times I could not capitalize those instances. At the same time however, I had kept my defense as best as I could and manage to scupper much of his assault, save for two critical errors, giving Buster two rounds via knockdowns.

At the last few rounds, I decided that if I tried to keep trying to knock Buster out, I would get a few my way. Struggling in survival mode, I decided that even though I probably have lost the fight on the judge's cards, it was worth a shot to try and outbox Buster and force a decision.

The final bell rung to end round 12 of this thrilling war. In an instant, the judge's rendered their decision and surprised was I from the scoring that I just could not let this pass without some photographs.

You read it right. Buster Dog won the fight though from the judge's cards, I would have figured it would have been a majority draw instead. A part of me feels that had I fought smarter in the first two rounds, I may have squeaked it out. Regardless of the outcome, I had a great time with this bout as well as learned a few things should I go for another match of this kind.

Another screenshot below for the statistics of the bout. You decide who fought the better fight.