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.

Random Thoughts: Youtube Channel App on Wii

Yes, I still use my Wii on some occasions.  Usually, it's just to browse the web or use the Youtube app and its hapless streaming and buffering insanity.  I remember long ago before the html5 video days that Youtube videos used to stream at 240p reliably on the Internet Channel but those days are long gone.  While the Youtube app plays videos at crisp visual detail, the buffering insanity means you'll barely ever get to watch anything.

Last night, I had an idea to improve my usage experience of this horrible app.  This is to play only videos with smaller resolution when encoded on Youtube.  You'll spot video preview images that sport a letterbox-like black borders versus those that have the full screen when you search for videos.  I think that these imply the video source uploaded to Youtube was not ideal and the server encoding ended up producing odd borders.  Less video image information per packet, should mean better buffering, hopefully.  I tried it on one video and got reasonable streaming performance.  I will look for other videos and see if this theory works.

As a funny extra random thought.  Try browsing the Nintendo Miiverse using the Internet Channel and laugh at Nintendo.