Mass Effect 2

What works

Tested on

- intel Corei5, 3G RAM
- asus nvidia gt250 1G RAM with binary drivers

The game works fine with a resolution of 1280x720 with effects enabled, but it ofthen slows down when there are many object and particles effects on screen. With dynamic shadows, film effect and ambient shadows disabled works fine.
You can import characters from Mass Effect, configure options and connect to Cerberus from the game.
For now the game has never crashed.

What does not

The installation stops while installing the nvidia Physx: it will try to install it even if you have installed the Physx package with winetricks and fails with an error. However the game is installed and playable launching the MassEffect2.exe executable.
The configuration dialog doesn't start, so you have to import manually your previous characters from MassEffect and you can configure the game only after it starts.
If you start the game through the laucher, you have no sound.
The input works only if you install the "dinput8" with winetricks and set it to "native"

Workarounds

What was not tested

DLC.
The whole game.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

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.