Mass Effect 2

What works

Everything, except some problems.

What does not

The installer freezes when it tries to install PhysX or DirectX.

You can kill the process when this happens, then install physx, directX and vc2005 from the DVD or via winetricks.

Using the AMD driver, the game freezes at every ingame movie.

You can only launch it by passing -nomovieplayback to the executable.

Using the open-source driver on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, the movies lag at the first few seconds, then its smooth again.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Full playthrough,

DLCs,

Nvidia driver

Mass Effect 1 Save-Import

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

AMD should really work on their drivers, they suck.

DLC for Mass Effect 2 seems to work okay. You need an EA account & Bioware account. You have to link your bioware account to your EA master account.

When done, you can login to http://social.bioware.com/user_entitlements.php  and download the  content manually.

I have tested the Inferno Armor, Blood Dragon Armor, Zaeed - The Price of Revenge (Cerberus Network), Normandy Crash Site (Cerberus Network).

Launch the installer in the wineprefix you have Mass Effect 2 installed, the installer will fail (for me) at cleaning up the install. It is safe to kill the install process.

Once you have started Mass Effect 2, login to the Cerberus Network with your EA account and the DLC will be authorised (you may get a warning the first time)

Please purge your previously wine installation before using that HowTo!

For patching and installing wine on Ubuntu:

apt-get build-dep wine
wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.5.9.tar.bz2
(This wine version is given as an example)
tar xjpf wine-1.5.9.tar.bz2
cd wine-1.5.9
wget dl.dropbox.com/u/6901628/raw3.patch
patch -p1 < raw3.patch
tools/./make_requests
tools/./wineinstall

For patching and installing wine on Gentoo:

mkdir -p /etc/portage/patches/app-emulation/wine-1.5.9
wget -O /etc/portage/patches/app-emulation/wine-1.5.9/raw_input.patch 'dl.dropbox.com/u/6901628/raw3.patch'
emerge =app-emulation/wine-1.5.9

Thanks to t800 for the tip ;-)

Increasing in-game performance

If you have experienced performance degradation please deactivate dynamic shadows and antialiasing from game graphic menu. Also set proprietary driver image settings to Maximum Performance. This helps for weak graphic cards like NVIDIA Geforce 120 GT.