ARMA II = Mouse Wheel

I've had ARMA II sitting on the Windows drive for a while now and everytime I played it, I am just boggled at how to do stuff. Pressing 'Enter' to perform action as suggested by the tutorial has got to be the stupidest control mapping in the world. That all changed last night.

Deep down, I felt that there was no possible way this game would gain a following with such controls and decided to roll the mouse wheel. Lo and behold, everything became playable all of a sudden. If the tutorial had once mentioned this, I would have been playing it more often.

Mass Effect 2 Demo and Wine: Getting there...

Am I a stubborn guy or what? I read a little bit about the issues and possible fix when I saw this forum discussion and a possible mouse hack patch for an older version of Wine (1.1.x). Here is the original patch.

I poked through the dinput.dll code and figured I should be updating the patch. I am 100% sure WineHq will not be accepting mouse hacks into their source so I don't think it will be of any good to submit it (Let me know otherwise).

Here is the patch From Pastebin With Love.

Nothing changed...

I suppose my Xorg version is too old. Compiling this new wine version didn't do anything at all.

Backporting Wine with Xinput2

I had problems backporting wine (still 1.3.33) with xinput 2. It seems to be what is called the Xmd.h inclusion bug (conflicting datatype declarations) and after a bit of reading, I couldn't make sense why this wouldn't work now. After digging up and trying to run the make on winex11drv to see what was happening, it turns out it's missing the libXext package. I slipped that in and everything built just fine. Now to see how mouse support is going.

Mouse woes with Mass Effect 2

It's a pretty well-documented problem. I've read that Xinput2 should have the proper extensions for mouse tracking which is at the heart of this issue. DirectX uses relative mouse movements while Xorg supports only absolute mouse movements.

Hopefully by installing the update to libxi (and others) proper mouse support can finally happen. Playing Mass Effect 2 with the mouse glitch and manually recentering the mouse cursor is not fun.

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.

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.