Some random ramblings...

When using mplayer, press 'o'... for the... "Oh sh*t Dis!" haha.

Also watched The Dark Knight Rises.  Wow.  Good movie.  Didn't think Chris would come back for a third one because although I didn't like The Dark Knight as much, I thought the ending was a perfect way to give the series to any director to continue as it establishes Batman's outlaw status.  Kudos to Nolan for coming back and delivering a much better movie.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent - Not a WINE Problem

Took a while, but I've dug up enough evidence to point that this isn't a WINE issue.

Link #1

Also, NVIDIA's 8800 cards were excluded from tests due to rendering errors during gameplay. While the game did run on our 8800, the Sam Fisher model was warped and twisted into a very strange shape making gameplay pretty much impossible, as the image shows below.

Link #2

For what it's worth, if you run into these problems with the game, you can try these fixes to see if they do anything.  They didn't work on my end though.

Run the game with a "-ll" (double 'L's) flag on the game.
"/path/to/splinter/cell/double/agent/SCDALauncher.exe -ll"
or
"/path/to/splinter/cell/double/agent/SCDALauncher.exe -LL"
or
"/path/to/splinter/cell/double/agent/SCDA-Offline/System/SplinterCell4.exe -ll"
or
"/path/to/splinter/cell/double/agent/SCDA-Offline/System/SplinterCell4.exe -LL"

Then try to disable AA and AF.  Not sure what else to try if these don't work.  Driver update?  I don't know.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent on Wine Update

Here's a tiny update.  I managed to muck around and get the auto updater to work for this game.

I installed these packages via winetricks: vcrun2003, vcrun2005, and vcrun2008 to get the dlls that the program needed.

Then you run:
/path/to/splinter/cell/da/support/UpdateLauncher/SC4UpdateLauncher.exe

This will download and install the 1.02a patch.  Did it fix Sam though?  Nope.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent on Wine

I got this game off a free promo and for the most part the game installation was extraordinarily smooth! I tried to launch the game from the desktop icon and didn't get much success.  I ran SCDALauncher.exe from the installed path to launch it.  It looked like it was working well until I got to the actual tutorial.

Poor Sam!  I have no idea why this is happening, but I'll keep trying.  So close yet so far!

Strange Wine Scratchy Audio Issue

I had a game that I run on Wine that kept exhibiting scratchy audio and after a few relaunches, it didn't seem to go away like I hope.  I then shut off pidgin and suddenly the scratchy audio went away.  Not sure what the correlation is with how both apps are using Pulse Audio, but it certainly is worth posting for possible further investigation.