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!

Mass Effect 2 and Screenshots

I wrapped up Mass Effect 1 yesterday and it was an interesting journey after playing Mass Effect 3 so many times and knowing much of the reveals.  I was going to move to playing Mass Effect 2 on my Linux box through Wine, but for some reason, it just wouldn't work.  I suspect it's because of Origin's activation thing that is tripping up, but after fighting with this for hours, I decided to install it right back on my old Vista laptop.

The next issue I had to fight with was the screenshot taking.  I used this forum thread to help.  To make things brief, what you need is to download the ME2CoalescedEditor and point it to your installed Mass Effect 2 path.  Then go to the BindingsManager, select the key to use (I used F12) at the bottom left panel, then select "Add New".  Type in 'Shot' (capitalizations don't matter, I think) on the command so it looks like:

Bindings=( Name="F12",Command="Shot")

Then, look for the BIOInput tab on the left side tabs and the following trees:

• SFXGameNodeConversation
• SFXGameNodeCinematics

Right click and then select Add Settings, then new single setting.  Paste the command above and then exit the editor (it automatically saves the changes).

There are two screenshot folders in Mass Effect 2.  The Bioware/Mass Effect 2/ScreenShots/ is always empty.  All screenshots go to Bioware/Mass Effect 2/BIOGame/Screenshots/.

May Lee Shepard

Reposted here.

Having left the wikia community.  The profile is gone.  I may re-post it here some day.

I had fun doing this in the Mass Effect wikia.  Hope you enjoy this profile.

Some ramblings...

Just a few things.  The stock gallery in Android really sucks.  When I finally got a microSDHC and moved all my photos and videos, this stupid app kept re-scanning the card and inserting duplicate thumbnail entries for each picture and video there.  Talk about stupid stuff.  I learned a few things on the Acer Tablet Forum.  Putting in the .nomedia file in the folder means that the apps (at least ones I've checked) will ignore this and treat it like there's no media files in there.  Second, from Settings > App > All, I can select Gallery and tap on Disable to turn the damn app off.  Lastly, I installed QuickPic which proved to be so much better.

On Sims FreePlay, if you need your Sim to go to work with low hygiene for that 1 LP reward, just send the sim to kick his own trash can and clean up that mess repeatedly.  Kicking a friend's trash can means hurting the relationship.

Mass Effect Infiltrator should not have had any walking parts in the actual combat.

Mass Effect 3 Demo and Wine - Does not work

I did a few tricks with Origin and played around with the install. Wine can run Mass Effect 3, but unfortunately, Mass Effect 3 requires Origin to play and will always say Origin is not running and thus forcing Mass Effect 3 to close. You can get all the way to the EA logo video and to the main menu. The game also tries to download an update but it does not seem to work. Oh well.

Mass Effect 3 Demo and Wine

I did try it via Origin on Wine and the install doesn't work. As far as I can tell, the installer fails when it's trying to install nVIDIA Physx redistributable package even though I already have Physx installed. I'm not sure if installing games works on Origin via Wine since I copied my Sims 3 Teaser install from an XP box. I think that's going to be how I will try to get Mass Effect 3 working.

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.