Tomb Raider: Underworld Wii vs PC

I managed to finish the Tomb Raider: Underworld PC demo and it made for an interesting experience for someone who has played the Wii version.  Obviously the graphics on the PC version are way better.  The Lara model always looked cheap to me on the Wii version and the face in particular seems to have been altered quite a bit from the HD editions.  A few minor details were strangely omitted in the Wii edition like the Video Cam Overlay during the opening cutscene of the Thailand level.  

There's way more enemies in the HD version (Sharks!  haha) while the Wii version has almost none.  I always preferred Tomb Raider with less enemies as I enjoy the climbing and leaping more than the shooting.  The levels are actually comparable.  Similar, but not exactly the same.  I'm honestly more surprised at how close the Wii levels resemble the PC ones.  The Wii edition seems to have regenerating health which points to a game that is much, much more forgiving.  Lara also seems to have more moves and acrobatics than on the Wii version.  Interesting, but at the same time, largely useless when you have pistols.

Different games, yet very similar.  That's interesting.

Tomb Raider: Underworld and Wine: Update

Well, I've been fiddling with this for some time and have seemingly fixed some of the audio issues I have.  Nope, not by using pasuspender which did absolutely nothing for me.  I started trying to use padsp but strange enough the padsp/oss combination doesn't work.

First thing I did was remove audio from the equation to see how the game genuinely worked in my system.  The game stuttered quite a bit so I had to bring down the effects.  I think most of the slowdowns had to do with shadows but for documentation sake, I ran with a resolution of 1920 by 1080 with "Enable Fullscreen Effects" and "Enable Water Effects".  My texture detail was high and texture filtering was trilinear.

When I got the game reasonably running well (or tolerable), I began to fiddle once again with my user.reg.  Here is what I came up with.

[Software\\Wine\\DirectSound]

"DefaultBitsPerSample"="16"

"DefaultSampleRate"="44100"

"EmulDriver"="N"

"HardwareAcceleration"="Full"

[Software\\Wine\\Drivers]

"Audio"="alsa"

[Software\\Wine\\Drivers\\winealsa.drv]

"DefaultOutput"="{0.0.0.00000000}.{B55AC68F-A179-4DC1-BD39-199D8419B343}"

"DefaultVoiceOutput"="{0.0.0.00000000}.{B55AC68F-A179-4DC1-BD39-199D8419B343}"

The winealsa.drv registry settings points to my digital out from HDMI.  I suppose that makes some sense.

I then ran the game: WINEPREFIX="/homedir/.local/share/wineprefixes/tru" wine path\\to\\tru.exe

Truth be told, I don't know why padsp is needed here (or if it is really needed at all!).  I will likely try it without the padsp wrapper to see if setting the winealsa.drv devices is enough.

I played the game for a full hour and it seems to work fine.  I'll be sure to post back when I find out what caused the buffer underrun issues.

UPDATE:
As suspected, padsp is not needed.  I will amend the entry now.

Tomb Raider Underworld and Wine

Well, I gave the demo for a spin because I did enjoy the game series on the Wii. It does look like Wine can handle the game properly, but the sound is incredibly choppy and it bogs everything down. I suspect this has something to do with the blast pulseaudio that is really giving me quite a headache. Maybe it is time to rip it out and install alsa!

Hmmm... definitely food for thought.