Be aware, that aforementioned stand-alone config utility in version 1.0 (unpatched) of Mass Effect has many issues under Windows as well, ofted resulting in its hang.
This problem occurs mainly (but not exclusively) on quad-processor machines.
Patched version should have this problems fixed (supposedly).
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. WineHQ is not responsible for what they say.
Mass Effect works perfectly
by Darius Willemse on Monday August 6th 2012, 11:23
Sorry, forgot to mention, I use PlayOnLinux 4.0.14
Mass Effect works perfectly
by Darius Willemse on Monday August 6th 2012, 11:22
I used wine 1.5.10 and the Mass Effect value retail edition (unpatched, not sure which version it is) and the game works perfectly, including the mouse in the game and the menu. I set mouse warp override to default. Try this and see if it sorts out your mouse issues.
I use Kubuntu 12.04 with proprietary Nvidia drivers for a Geforce 610.
Mass Effect fails to install
by Darvon on Monday December 26th 2011, 5:45
Hi! When I try to install the game with wine 1.3.35, at the very end of the installation, it crashes. I also wrote in the Forum. What could I do, to play the game?
Works with NVDIA and PlayOnLinux
by Chris on Monday July 4th 2011, 13:13
This game run great with playonlinux.org scripts (its wine 1.2.2)! I have still the unpatched Version and tried some different modified executables to got it work.
I also install some different files as here in the Comment's recommend...
Visual issues and performance
by Mike on Thursday February 11th 2010, 23:51
I just started replaying ME1 after finishing ME2 a few times and I've noticed that my performance is severely degraded using the same setup I finished with for ME2. Initially I was playing ME2 with 1.1.21-23 and later switched to 1.1.37-38 with a d3d surface patch (to fix the startup crashes) toward the end. Performance wasn't so great with the earlier versions of wine, but the game ran pretty well with the newer versions (some chop on the Normandy). It's almost the complete opposite with ME1. When I switch to older versions of wine (specifically 1.1.18 and 1.1.23) I notice a huge improvement in performance., actually better than I remember it when I played the first time. I remember the Citadel being pretty choppy, so far it's been remarkably smooth.
Like with earlier versions of wine on ME2, I've had a few random and frequent crashes. Unlike earlier versions with ME2 I'm seeing some strange visual corruptions... Kaidan's body regularly appears as a mesh of jagged textures as do my holstered weapons. This seems to happen more often with 1.1.18 than it does with .23. Another problem with these earlier versions is that some walls and textures are completely black and overlap characters and holograms in the foreground. This is something I don't remember happening when I first played the game with 1.1.16-18 and .21. Maybe it's related to NVIDIA's 195.36.03 drivers. I'm seeing flickering textures in ME1 with these older versions of wine, which is no surprise since I remember them from my first playthrough and in ME2 until I switched to 1.1.37+. It doesn't look great, but the black textures bother me the most... They're widespread and extremely distracting.
I'd prefer to use more recent versions of wine as ME2 seemed far more stable, and in this case less problematic visually (no flickering or black textures, or jaggy character bodies), but the performance is extraordinarily bad. High or low visuals, motion blur on or off, nothing helps.
So far user.reg and .ini tuning hasn't helped with the various problems I'm having with 1.1.18,23 or 1.1.38. Certain settings cause the game to hang at startup. Sometimes I don't change a thing and the game hangs at startup anyway.
Texture problems on character faces
by Mike on Thursday January 7th 2010, 13:24
I was trying a different mouse patch today (mouseut3engine.diff from bug 6971) and noticed that some characters have dark squares and other shapes on their faces with wine-1.1.33, which is something I don't remember when I originally played the game with 1.1.16-18,21. I wasn't sure if this was related to my NVIDIA drivers or wine, so I installed wine-1.1.21 and the texture issues were gone. Performance was also noticeably better when I briefly tested the outdoor areas of Noveria.
Tactics HUD problem
by Thomas Themel on Saturday January 2nd 2010, 15:48
I've got the game running in 1.1.32 with the latest applicable mouse patch from Bug 6971, but I have another gameplay problem - using press & hold keys to get to the tactics HUD shows the HUD, but only for a short time - it disappears after about a second. Anyone else seen this?
Skin textures
by stub on Friday September 11th 2009, 12:33
I had the Skin texture problem fixed by updating nvidia drivers to 190.25. Only problem left was the facial shadows. Whole face was covered by shadow on conversation view. Toggling off dynamic shadows "fixed" the issue.
Also I needed to have UseGLSL disabled to fix occasional large black textures on playscene.
Mouse patch
by DL on Thursday July 30th 2009, 8:45
This patch seems to fix all of the mouse problems, although I had to up the sensitivity to 100 to get a decent camera speed.
bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=21554
Run like this: WINEFORCEMOUSEWARP=yes wine MassEffect.exe
I have an nvidia 8600 and Ive managed to get mass effect running, however ingame is so so slow. Ive seen comments by people who have an 8500 and say tehy can run at decent speeds. I dont quite understand why mine isnt (all game settings on low)
steam version on 1.1.20?
by Alex on Friday May 8th 2009, 19:00
Has anyone had any luck getting the Steam version of ME running on wine 1.1.20? I see lots of comments that sound like it "just works" but I've had no success at all, and I wonder if the Steam version works differently somehow.
Besides setting OffscreenRenderingMode="fbo" what other tweaks do I still need to apply?
GPF with wine-1.1.19
by Mike on Saturday April 11th 2009, 22:18
Is anyone able to run Mass Effect with wine-1.1.19? I'm getting a GPF on startup that looks like it's related to VC runtime. I've not installed any native .dlls for that.
err:seh:raise_exception/err:seh:setup_exception_record
by ylai on Thursday April 9th 2009, 4:21
Note that crashes immediately after "Press Any Key", either as err:seh:raise_exception or err:seh:setup_exception_record (very similar or possibly identical to bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15648 ), can be caused by the installer failing to run dvd_path/Data/DataSetup.exe during the installation. Running it with Wine will fix the problem.
Searching by Google reveals that this is a widespread problem under Windows that people "resolve" by reinstalling. In fact, if you run the same unfinished installation that crashes Wine under Windows, it will crash at exactly the same spot.
I was crashing (GPF) constantly at two different spots in the final battle: when resuming from the main menu following a crash, and playing through from a previous quicksave to the cutscene in the middle of the fight. The only way I got past this was by installing directx9 with winetricks, then resetting the dinput8 override back to native.
Prior to this, wine would freeze up occasionally and I'd have to kill the process. Nothing 100% reproducible like the crash at the end, but it seemed to happen more as the game went. I'm not sure if installing directx9 would have helped for those.
wine-1.1.18+mouse&preloader patches. A bit chunky in some areas on my E8400+GTX260, but playable. As I mentioned in a previous post here, the mouse control was extremely frustrating, like using a dirty ball mouse. I regularly had to repeat movements before the game would pick it up or fully get the viewport where I wanted it to go. Every once in a while I'd see the Windows mouse pointer appear, usually after doing something in the menus, that severely limited where you could look and it took a second before returning to normal.
It was a good game (how about that voice acting?), that would have been a far more enjoyable experience if the mouse worked better.. :I
preloader patch required also
by Daniel on Sunday March 15th 2009, 3:48
The preloader patch for the source version of wine is required also. Without it, the game will frequently crash with "out of memory" errors. The patch can be found here. bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=19364. The patch can be applied by going to the loader folder and by patching the file preloader.c. The patch, once copied there can be applied with "patch -p0 < preloader.c. With this and the mouse patch, I've been able to have a reasonably stable time of playing Mass Effect.
Mouse works in the game.
by Kol on Thursday January 29th 2009, 15:52
Mass Effect runs at appropriate speed on an Acer Aspire notebook with
GeForce 8600M GS videocard if "Motion Blur" is disabled.
Also I found that Mass Effect is governable by the mouse only when
the native dinput8.dll from DirectX is in use (set by winecfg). Then
the mouse actions work well in menu and in game, but the mouse movement
in game is inadequate even at maximal mouse sensitivity. Turning of
the look in any direction by the mouse acts only in the finite range
and the further movement stops. The range of turning depends on place
- in scenes with many objects it may be a few degrees. It seems that
the mouse pointer leaves the window but it happens in the full-screen
mode. At the same time, for the above problem it does not matter
whether dinput.dll used is native or Wine built-in.
Game works well!
by Cuchac on Sunday January 4th 2009, 19:38
I have GeForce 9800 and the game has VERY HIGH fps without any glitches even on ultra-high details - you just need to disable Motion Blur in graphic settings. Unfortunately the mouse is not working for me - It looks like the menu accept mouse movements but not mouse clicks and in-game accepts mouse clicks but no mouse movements. So the game is "playable", you can walk, speak to othersa and do almost everything, but mouse look is not working. I think it can be very easy to fix this.
Trial run
by Seppo Yli-Olli on Friday October 17th 2008, 6:39
I started combining results from previous tests and added a few of my own:
First manual install, then VC2005SP1, then xinput1_3.dll.
I noted that it gave a message concerning pbo tests before crashing.
Thus I set HKCU->Software->Wine->Direct3D->OffScreenRenderingMode=fbo.
Then the game started, showed videos for maker logos and crashed before getting to main menu. Progress is inevitable. :)
another game effected by same bug.
by Chris on Wednesday September 10th 2008, 23:37
Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 also suffers from this same problem. I have messed with the VC2005 distro files inside and out and I can not get around this. No idea whats going on or why installing VC2005 distro files doesnt solve this as it should.
and this file Microsoft.VC80.CRT.manifest in the Binaries folder of MassEffect download here uploaded.to/?id=nlo7yn
but it's don't work anyway error
fixme:actctx:parse_assembly_elem wrong version for assembly manifest
fixme:actctx:parse_manifest_buffer failed to parse manifest L"C:\\Programme\\Mass Effect\\Binaries\\Microsoft.VC80.CRT.manifest"
fixme:actctx:parse_depend_manifests Could not find dependent assembly L"Microsoft.VC80.CRT"
err:module:attach_process_dlls "MSVCR80.dll" failed to initialize, aborting
err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Main exe initialization for L"C:\\Programme\\Mass Effect\\Binaries\\MassEffect.exe" failed, status c0000142
RE: Trouble with Configuration Tool
by Bryan Haskins on Saturday June 7th 2008, 12:38
MassEffectConfig does not work, it locks up visibly in the hardware detection stage. All you can do is skip it with a windows copy of the config folder.
