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.