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RE: freezing and stuttering
by Alexey Loukianov on Monday June 7th 2010, 9:12
I had been experiencing similar troubles when were using wine's ALSA sound backend in conjunction with nVidia HDA integrated sound card.
Default alsa configuration for this soundcard uses dmix to allow multiple applications to use the soundcard simultaneously, and it looks like there are some minor incompatibilities between wine-alsa+HL2+dmix.
Switching to the wine-oss + kernel-oss emulation fixed the problem in my case, so it might be helpful in your either. Keep in mind that new Steam client by default will open-up soundcard (looks like it uses it for microphone recording test purposes), so it will lock OSS /dev/dsp for itself. It might be tricky to make /dev/dsp free for use by the HL2.
In my case it was possible to use /dev/dsp in HL2 only in case you start it using "wine steam.exe -applaunch 220 -novid -width 1680 -height 1050", but your mileage may vary.
One of the possible approaches to overcome this catch is to use "on the fly" wine sound driver change + configuring wine alsa driver to use pcm.null as the sound device.
Approximate steps might be:
1. Set wine to use alsa, edit the registry to make it use "null" as the alsa PCM device.
2. Start up Steam client.
3. Start up the registry editor, change the wine sound driver to the OSS.
4. Start up HL2.
5. Profit!
Don't forget to disable PulseAudio first in case you have it installed.
