Wii U and Storage Space

I've bought quite a few digital games on my Wii U and the 32 GB storage is absolutely woeful.  To make matters worse, the eShop insists that I have enough free space to BUY a game.  Absolutely insane to think about this restriction.

At first, I figured I could use my spare micro SD with an SD card adapter as back up but apparently, it's only usable on Wii mode!  What in the world?!  I swear, sometimes, Nintendo tries hard to be incredibly dumb!

So, at the end, it looks like I will have to buy a USB hard drive with an AC adapter OR with a Y-cable to use the USB power.  It seems that these drives have sleep modes if there isn't an independent source of power.

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.

Mass Effect: The K-Pop Space Diva Edition

So finally, I've cleaned up May Lee Shepard's text and re-uploaded it.  Read it here!

Assassin's Creed Director's Cut and Wine

I've been pleased that this GOG.com release of Assassin's Creed works out of the box on Wine.  However, a recent update, Wine 1.7.30 on Ubuntu via launchpad, has a regression in that the sunlight in this game is way too bright. It's making the world bleached white. I used POL and downloaded an older version of Wine to fix this issue.  I downloaded Wine 1.7.27 which didn't seem to exhibit this issue.  Word of warning to those using Wine to play.

GOG with Wine

I'll keep this brief.  I tried installing the Witcher Card game beta some time back and had to use the /verysilent parameter to get through.  Had some error messages but the game worked.  It looks like the update facilities do not work on Wine so I may have to re-download the installer and get a new version.

Currently, I'm trying to install Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut.  Ran into some install issues so looking over at WineHQ, I found some list of components to install.

$ winetricks d3dx10 d3dx9_26 d3dx9_28 d3dx9_31 d3dx9_35 d3dx9_36 d3dx9_39 d3dx9_42 d3dx9_43 d3dx9 directx9 physx vcrun2003 vcrun2005 vcrun2008 vcrun2010 vcrun6sp6 vcrun6 wmp10 xact_jun2010 xact xinput

Ran into the same empty message window again, so I'm running the setup with the /verysilent parameter.

Update: I think that the additional packages may have broken x360ce on Wine.  My previously configured ini file seems to work though so I just copied it into the folder.  There seems to be no added benefit to the libraries.  Direct3D 10 doesn't work so you have to run Assassin's Creed using the Direct3D 9 binary.

Also, the Witcher Adventure Multiplayer Beta no longer works, it seems.  It doesn't recognize the account as part of the closed beta.

Mass Effect 3, Origin Cloud and Wine

So, I had installed Mass Effect 3 on my Windows Vista laptop and also on my Wine Linux box and I decided to use Origin cloud to sync up everything so I could play on the go on the laptop and at the Linux box when I'm around.  On Vista, it picked up my Mass Effect 3 saves from Wine, no problem.  Apparently, I had issues when I was syncing my saves back to the Wine box.  At first, I simply chalked it up to Wine's own deficiencies and moved on.  When I went around to copying my saves from the Vista laptop to my Wine box however, I noticed that all the files touched by Origin's cloud save on Wine had 000 file permissions.  I also checked that the files were of the same size as the Vista files I copied.

I infer that this means the cloud sync actually worked but only the file permissions were goofed up.  Next time, I will try to simply chmod this.  As an additional side note, cloud syncing on Wine only works when launching Mass Effect 3 since Origin in Wine cannot detect when the game is finished running to sync back the progress.  The only way around this is to exit Origin, then restart again.

Nintendo DS Shoulder Button Unresponsive

I have to slap my head on this as I used to do these sort of cleaning tasks back in the day with the Famicom and the Megadrive.  The old DS I have started having issues with the R button.  It was responding at random and so I thought the button was just busted.  In fairness, the system is really old, and literally glued together due to numerous abuses from other people.  I decided to do a quick Google search for possible solution and the simplest solution to give the button a good and hard blow should do the trick.  There was probably way too much dirt on the contacts and this was apparently all I needed.  Phew.