Mass Effect 2

What works

• Installing the game
• Running the game
  
• Sound (sometimes)
• Keyboard/Playing/Walking (sometimes)

What does not

• Sound:

Sometimes sound *dies* after the two intro movies. Some windows users experienced the same problem as can be seen on their forums. No real fix has been noticed by me, however changing the "MaxChannels" option (see far below) between 128 and 256 and launching the game seems to fix it after 2-4 launches. Even then, sound still has weird static in the background.

• Graphics:

Graphics seemed sluggish and incredibly slow. After a long time of researching for configurations I got it to a very playable degree, however I cannot vow for the replication of the wanted effect. My graphics card is GTX580 (pretty high end) and if I had problems with that...

• Keyboard:

Sometimes the keyboard gets ignored completely. I saw the same problem for other wine users, the recommended way to fix it was supposedly to run it in a virtual desktop, I have yet to attempt that. I do note however that it occasionally works. I also noticed that whenever that problem will happen, when you type something, there will be a small window to the extreme bottom right, similar to what you get when you type in Nautilus without selecting anything. I'm planning to look more into it.

• Spacebar (Use key)

Some users, including me (occasionally) and windows users noticed that the blue "selected" icon is not appearing sometimes. They recommend running the game at a lower resolution to increase framerate. Since I just passed a long time improving it and had ~110fps in the end (with 15 at lowest) I was certain it was over the 10 they said it required, so I still have to look into that issue.

Workarounds

What was not tested

• Certain fixes to what was mentioned above.
  

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Suggested fixes to greatly improve the usability of the game: Install dinput8, d3dx9, d3dx9_36, d3dx9_43, dsound, vcrun2008, physx using winetricks. Set dinput8 and d3dx9_36 as native in winecfg. In "My Documents/BioWare/Mass Effect 2/BIOGame/Config", open GamerSettings.ini . This is the configuration file. Here is the pastebin to mine, add whatever settings you want, adding them all should get you the same experience as me. http://pastebin.com/dMCNSUMj

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.