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!

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/.

Batch processing with GIMP

I found a useful article on how to get GIMP to perform tasks on files.  Have a look at this.  Be sure to apt-get install gimp-plugin-registry.

Origin on Wine and the Preparing Download

Well, I've gotten stuck on Wine and Origin's Preparing Download and had forgotten to patch Qt5Network.dll that had been overwritten by several Origin updates.  I'm fortunate that the patch is still in my Origin install folder so I backed up the new dll and re-ran the patch to fix it.  Details on this issue are on this Wine Bug thread.

Mass Effect 1 was pretty good and I finished it entirely in Wine/Linux.  Awesome!

Windows Vista Disk Thrashing

I've tolerated Vista's insane disk thrashing forever now and usually the system would lock up with disk activity once in a session.  Having used Vista more often now, I decided to have a look at why in the world is this happening.  I have reduced it and here's the three basic culprit:

1. Windows Search Indexing - Go to the Services and disable this service from starting up.
2. Windows SuperFetch - This is also in the Services
3. Automatic Disk Defragmenting - Go to Accessories, System Tools and then Disk Defragmenter.  Then, disable the Run on a schedule option.

Of the three, disk defragmenter was the major culprit of locking up.  So, if you're suffering, disable this one first.

Mass Effect 2 and sudden poor frame rate

My friend was going through Mass Effect trilogy and suffered sudden drops of frame rate in Mass Effect 2 mid-game and we were going through possible workarounds to solve her problems.  After all the tests, it turns out it was as simple as disabling the Origin overlay.  Damn crazy!

Update on Realtek ALSA

I figured I'd put this down for whoever ends up finding this post.  I'm buying a new sound card and disposing the onboard sound.  Whoever is having issues with the ALC line of sound cards can look into Realtek's ALSA fork.