Mass Effect 2

What works

Everything except for the issues below (all of which have workarounds). The game runs great with dynamic shadows. No LAG. No screen tearing. Game starts up quickly. You can safely minimize/switch workspaces without messing up the game. Mouse works perfectly in fullscreen mode.

What does not

The intstaller crashes when attempting to install PhysX, but the installation of the game is already completed at this point, so you can just force quit and everything will be fine (but you need to use winetricks physx, of course)

 Using my usual 64-bit wine prefix and the ALSA sound drivers, the sound would almost always be crackly, but would usually get better over time until it worked perfectly. Switching workspaces away and back again seemed to rapidly accelerate this.

 However, starting a new 32-bit wine prefix (WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX= wine MassEffect2.exe) and using the default pulseaudio drivers resulted in flawless audio every time. I'm not sure whether ALSA or being 64-bit (or both) caused the problem.

 The configuration utility works for everything except for importing a Mass Effect 1 character, which does nothing. You can work around this by doing it manually (find a file that starts with Char_ in the /BioWare/Mass Effect/Save folder and copy it to /BioWare/Mass Effect 2/Save/ME1. You will need to create the ME1 folder. Now, when you create your character in Mass Effect 2, you will be able to import your Mass Effect 1 character.)

For some reason, the game starts minimized.

Workarounds

What was not tested

I never tested the game using a virtual desktop since it was not needed. (Game runs perfectly in fullscreen, and it correctly releases mouse control when you switch workspaces and takes it back when you go back.

I never tested logging into the Cerberus network

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

The following winetricks were performed before running the game: winetricks d3dx9_36 physx I mounted both installation CDs before installing. The installer from the first CD automatically installs the entire game as it sees the second CD is already mounted. No need to run anything from the second CD.

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.