Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning demo revisited

I had only one purpose for revisiting the demo and that was to get the Chakram Launcher for Mass Effect 3.  I went about downloading the demo but the game refused to log me into Origin.  Fortunately, I found a fix here.  Go to Documents then My Games then Reckoning and look for the personal.ini file.  Edit the file and remove blaze_email=your@email.com.  Then restart the game.  It should all be fine.

To get the Chakram Launcher, play the demo and until you speak with the fateweaver in the overworld.  The demo will tell you that you have a 45 minute window to play the game.  Finish that 45 minutes and you'll receive the DLC.

Starting EA Origin in Offline Mode

From this forum thread, the parameter is "Origin.exe /StartOffline".

Random Thoughts: Wii U and the Thomson Tablet

I find myself surprised at how addictive Mass Effect 3's multiplayer is.  The singleplayer story has been a great ride, but I had no plans on ever dabbling on the multiplayer part.  It seems to be very well designed in that it makes the game very hard to put down.  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about New Super Mario Bros. U.

For a Mario game, I found myself slowly loathing the game the farther I got into the game.  The levels turn into a total drag to play and the Luigi Super Guide is just not a fun way of pushing the game forward when you've hit your limit.  Alas, my nephew loves the game, so I am forced to tolerate this drivel of a game.

Just got a new Android tablet called Thomson M6.  Here's some pics of the box.

Specifications

Thomson M6

It seems to be a Chinese OEM tablet released in Australia and New Zealand.  After all, how else can the NZ Herald Times app be preinstalled in this?  For a cheap 7" tablet, I found the fact it was dual core very attractive.  The tablet is plenty zippy and it also comes with Google Play Store.  Strangely, it didn't have Google Play Services which seems to be required for apps like Youtube.  You can install it via Play Store though so it shouldn't be much of an issue.

There are two main downsides to this tablet.  First is the screen.  The touch is just plain weird as it sometimes registers incorrect gestures.  Dragging icons seems to be very difficult on this tablet.  The LCD screen also suffers from colour loss when viewed from an angle.  Truly not one of its shining moments.  The second is the battery life which really sucks up fast.

Over all, it seems to be okay.  Doesn't hit all the bells, but for a cheap price tag, that is to be expected.

F You EA...

Once upon a time, I chuckled over the news that Electronic Arts was named 'Worst Company' by Consumerist Readers for a second year in a row. Over blown? At the time, I would think so, yes. My first hand experience leads me to believe that there's more truth to this than I originally expected.

This all started with me downloading Mass Effect 2 on Origin Games. The game started without much issues but when I attempted to register the product code to BioWare's social community website, the code was rejected. Not much of a big deal, but I figured I could slip in a ticket to see if EA could lend some assistance while I plow through the game. Looking back, I probably should never have.

EA did come back with a response and after a few back and forth response and some verification questions answered, they supplied me with a new product code that BioWare's site happily accepted. What I did not realize was that they had added another copy of Mass Effect 2 in my Origin account. What's the big deal? Lots.

This new copy was wrecking havoc with the license activation in my laptop. When I launch the game, I am greeted with this "Invalid License Reason Code = Invalid Cipher (0x0006)". Well, isn't that nice?

I scoured the web for solutions. I also reopened my ticket with EA pertaining to this issue and the only thing they did was delete the ticket. Yes. Delete. Gone. Needless to say, I was infuriated by their actions and submitted another ticket. That one did not fare any better as EA just decided to close the ticket with an empty promise of coming back to me with 'expert' assistance.

I've found out that EA holds its license files at C:\ProgramData\Electronic Arts\EA Services\License\*.dlf.  I've tried deleting the dlf file and repairing install but to no avail.  I also went through the trouble of redownloading the game which failed to make any difference.  Finally, I had a eureka moment when I realized I was doing all this hullabaloo with the new and faulty Mass Effect 2 copy.

I shut down Origin.  I deleted the dlf file.  Turned Origin back on and then used the old Mass Effect 2 game and repaired the install.  It threw a couple of errors a couple of times before finally working.  The game downloaded an additional 60 MB of which I have no idea what they are.  Then, the game started.

No thanks, EA.  Your help site is convoluted and crappy.  Your assistance broke more than fixed things.  I... FIXED my problem.

EA Origin Store Client on Wine

I have had some issues with Origin beginning last year where the client would just crash and crash.  No matter what version of Wine I used, it wouldn't run at all.  I moved through different Ubuntu distro versions and still no luck.  The crash point is C:\Program Files\Origin\Origin.exe: double free or corruption (!prev) and it seems to happen sporadically. After poking through the wine bug entries here and here, I figured out how to get the client to run reliably.

Since I installed my Origin client on a 32-bit Wine prefix, the commandline you'll see here is specifically for that.

WINEPREFIX="/path/to/wineprefix/of/origin" WINEARCH=win32 taskset -c 0 Origin.exe

Try it and see if it works!

EA at Ubuntu Developer Summit!

"We are a platform agnostic company." - Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Ha!

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.

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.