Wine-ing About Everything

So, the past few weeks of using Wine was interesting to say the least.  I had not realized how big this post was going to be until it was all done, so I'm putting this all after the jump!

Losing sound on select games...

I've noticed that on some games, I lose sound not only on the game, but also on the entire desktop. It's an odd issue, but I believe I have finally found a possible cause. I have tried playing Natural Selection 2 and although I am happy that it comes with a Linux client, along with Trine 1 and 2, as well as Red Orchestra, the sound goes away until I reboot.

I decided to run ldd on it to see if there were clues. I noticed that when I compare it with games that don't exhibit this behaviour that NS2 has a link to libasound.so which I think is a sure sign that this is another one of those ALSA vs Pulse Audio conflicts.  I will do more research, but this is a theory that is making a lot of sense at the moment.

Saints Row IV Crash!!!

I experienced what seems to be a very common problem with Saints Row IV on Steam.  There are countless complaints about crashes that happen at start up right after the company logos and stuff.  I managed to find a thread that helped me get my game working.  Basically, it involves looking for the display.ini file in the SteamApps copy of SR4 and setting "fullscreen = false" and "Preset = 1".  The game launched afterwards but switching to full screen would crash the game.  Setting it to borderless though doesn't, which works pretty much the same way!

LA Noire - Poor Performance and Possible Solution

I had suffered through more than half of the game with such appalling performance on LA Noire on my aging Vista laptop.  I'm not one to complain so I chucked it off as just less than low performance.  It's almost like my Witcher 2 days coming back to haunt me.  On one particular case, the frame rate woes were really starting to get grating so I just had to dig up information on this.

All my graphical settings were set to low and I was playing on an 800x600 window and it was still stuttering.  The only option I didn't touch was 'Threading' which I left at Multi.  It seems like my research has lead me to believe that the game has issues with the threading on specific hardware (e.g. dual core processors) so I took a leap of faith.

Changing the Threading to Single was the kind of performance change I needed.  The improvements were dramatic and the game was playing fairly smoothly now.  I feel like a fool for even tolerating such poor performance.  Now it's time once again to find where the performance threshold is on my Intel Core 2 Duo laptop.  I hope this helps others who are suffering from performance woes.

Brütal Legend and Steam

So, after going through some really disappointing Indie games, I get to Brütal Legend which was a great surprise.  It works on Linux and it plays really well.  I had minor problems figuring out the controller support but this Steam thread should be helpful.  First thing is first though, you should configure the gamepad on Big Picture.  The shell script needs some Linux reworking to get rid of the dos \r stuff, but once you've cleaned it up, it will grab the SDL configuration for you.  The script is modified for Costume Quest (which funnily enough is modified from The Cave), but it's easy to change the paths for your install of Brütal Legend.

Good luck and save that SDL config file!

Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition: D3D Error 16:10 Not Supported

I'll keep this one brief.  Had a problem with Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition on Steam where the game refuses to start.  This Steam thread helped me get this one sorted.  Basically, open your Windows Explorer and go to %appdata% location and look for MKKE.  You'll find the dxdiag.txt file.  Open it and change the Dedicated Memory to 1024 MB.  Save the file and set it to Read-Only.  This will trick the game into thinking it has enough Video RAM to run the game.  Then watch the game reconfigure the settings.

Upgrade to Ringtail

I must admit, I am impressed that this panned out much more painless than I expected.  Everything looks a-okay but I did have a problem in getting two things to work.

Google Chrome looks for libudev.so.0 which is missing.  I had to do a symlink from libudev.so.1 to make it work.

Steam's apt repository does not seem to have Raring Ringtail versions.  I disabled the repository for now.  Steam itself seems to be working.

Making gamepads work

Thought I'd drop this little link here for those who need help with getting gamepads to work on Steam.  Here's another link based on Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection.

Steam's Hardware Survey detects Wine

This is something I found interesting though it's not really much of a surprise with Valve finally giving Linux some respect.

Patching Steam's Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection

I managed to get the game patched before but that was after numerous tries to get the auto-updater to work.  I'm posting this as an archive so I don't lose this information.  

64-bit

"C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\XLive\Updates\57520fa2\Content\setup.exe" /f "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\mortal kombat arcade kollection"

32-bit

"C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft \XLive\Updates\57520fa2\Content\setup.exe" /f "C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\mortal kombat arcade kollection"

This is a very helpful thread on that.

Steam Servers Are Too Busy...

Recently, I received a guest pass for a game on Steam which is certainly a welcome surprise (Thanks Anton!). As you may or may not know, Steam's guest pass allows recipients to play the full retail game for a couple of days. In this case, I have 3 days (I think!) to play this new title.

Fire up Steam, and I immediately jumped into this deal, but as I tried to download the game, I noticed something woeful. Each time I tried to install it, I get Steam Servers are too busy. Okay, so maybe after a few minutes. Again, I get this problem. Hmm...

As it turned out, I had spent the entire morning trying to grab the game, compounded by:

1. Steam Servers are too busy errors...
2. Steam freezing on me...
3. My internet disconnecting.

Steam was kind enough to explain to me that the license expiration begins the moment I enable the guest pass key. Splendid. Now, I get to try and download this game and if I'm lucky, I might get a minute of play out of it. What a great deal!