Mass Effect 2

What works

Installation with PlayOnLinux 4.1.9 & Wine 1.5.24 

Direct X 9 full capabilities (dynamic shadows, high quality bloom, motion blur, light environment shadows, spherical harmonic lighting, number of cinematic lights 3)
multiple resolutions (widescreen, fullscreen, windowed)
Audio (music & sound effects)
Mouse & Keyboard 

What does not

Sometimes Mouse warp override would not work in windowed mode
Desktop resolution has to match the game resolution before launching 

Workarounds

What was not tested

Playing through full campaign
Multiplayer

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Installation: Mass Effect 2 requires two DVD disks for installation but PlayOnLinux would never continue with the second disk. I had to copy all the data from Disk 1 and the game data from Disk 2 into a single folder for Mass Effect to properly install DVD Key DRM problems: Wine ver 1.5.24 seems to be the only version that allows the game Key to sync with the DVD. All other version resulted in an error. Mouse warp override: Had problems keeping the mouse in the game window. When you configure Wine, make sure to select "Graphics" and check "Automatically capture the mouse in full-screen windows". Otherwise your character will not be able to rotate in full 360 deg motion. Windowed Mode: Full-screen mode would not allow the keyboard to work but Windowed Mode retained mouse & keyboard functionality.

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.