Mass Effect Tips

Mass Effect, through Steam, has only one problem on CXG Linux 8.1.4 (and on Mac too, apparently): the mouse. And here is how to fix it (this is entirely based on Exile's post, thanks, Exile!).

(You can also try downloading the precompiled binaries, at the end of the post.)

1. Download the wine source code
2. Download the patches (click the links and go File -> Save As):
• winex11.drv.diff
• dinput.dll.diff or modified dinput.dll.diff for wine 1.1.35

The original dinput.diff no longer works on wine 1.1.35 (the latest as of post date), so I've created a modified version.

3. Install the compilers and the patcher. On Ubuntu, open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install build-essential patch

4. Install the wine dependencies. The wine wiki was pretty helpful: Recommended Packages
5. Extract the source code. In a terminal, go to the folder where you downloaded the tarball and:

tar jxvf wine-{version}.tar.bz2
cd wine-{version}

6. Copy the diff files into the wine-{version} folder.
7. Patch the files. From the terminal in wine-{version} folder:

patch -p1 < winex11.drv.diff
patch -p1 < dinput.dll.diff

If you stuck to the original dinput.diff, now is the time to finish the patch by hand.

8. Compile. Wine comes with its own wineinstall tool, which compiles and installs wine, but you probably don't want to install and extra version of wine. So we'll compile only the parts we need with the following commands:

./configure (or ./configure --without-freetype, see paragraph below)
cd dlls/dinput
make depend
make
cp dinput.dll.so {MassEffectFolder}/Binaries/dinput.dll
cd ../winex11.drv
make depend
make
cp winex11.drv {MassEffectFolder}/Binaries/winex11.drv

A note on configure: I could not run it successfully in amd64 because there where no 64-bit libraries for freetype, or something like that. So I had to configure without freetype. There's probably all sorts of options that this compilation doesn't need, actually, but I haven't figured them out. The ./configure command will be the most time consuming, but should take only a couple of minutes.

Naturally, all commands should exit successfully.

Your {MassEffectFolder} should be in /home/{user}/.cxgames/{bottle}/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/steamapps/common/mass effect/ (pheww!).

9. Run Mass Effect and enjoy!

Precompiled amd64 Binaries (ubuntu karmic, wine 1.1.35)

• dinput.dll
• winex11.drv

Precompiled i686 Binaries (ubuntu karmic, wine 1.1.35)

• dinput.dll
• winex11.drv