mercoledì 27 febbraio 2013

The Humble Bundle Mojam #2

http://www.humblebundle.com

Do you remember the Humble Bundle Mojam? Yes, it is now time for the second episode of this bundle!
Developers from Mojang, Wolfire, Oxeye, Vlambeer, Grapefrukt and Ludosity are creating games in 72 hours! Pay what you want for a bunch of brand new indie games!




Unfortunately, i'm late again. For the first 72 hours you could see those developers creating live. Now, they finished their live streaming and are building the executables for the games created.
But you're still in time for paying and getting all the games!
You have still a few days!
Don't be stupid and be quick, pay what you want, help charity and get a bunch of brand new games!

Wine 1.5.24 released

The Wine development release 1.5.24 is now available.

What's new in this release (see below for details):
  - Keyboard and mouse wheel support in the Mac driver.
  - Regular expression support in VB Script.
  - Many RichEdit code cleanups.
  - Various bug fixes.

The source is available from the following locations:

  http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.5.24.tar.bz2
  http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/1.5/wine-1.5.24.tar.bz2
 
For the complete list of bug fixes follow this link:
 
http://www.winehq.org/announce/1.5.24 

domenica 3 febbraio 2013

Wine 1.5.23 released

The Wine development release 1.5.23 is now available.

What's new in this release (see below for details):
  - HTTPS support no longer dependent on OpenSSL.
  - Support for event handling in the Mac driver.
  - A functional Netstat built-in application.
  - A bunch of C++ runtime math functions.
  - Various bug fixes.

The source is available from the following locations:

  http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.5.23.tar.bz2
  http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/1.5/wine-1.5.23.tar.bz2 
 
For the complete list of bug fixes follow this link:
 
http://www.winehq.org/announce/1.5.23 

sabato 19 gennaio 2013

Let's Play: Street Fighter X Tekken


Welcome again to a brand new Let's Play! This time i'm going to show you how to install and run without too much pain in the ass, one of the games from the most famous series of fighting games in history: Street Fighter X Tekken! This game uses the same fighting system and graphics as Street Fighter 4, but includes characters from Tekken world.
So, let's see how it works!

A hard choice?

No, it is not. Do you wanna know why?

Street Fighter X Tekken on Crossover 12 (12.0.0 version):

The game installs correctly and starts fine. But after game logo, main menù is completely black and there's no way to do anything.

Street Fighter X Tekken on PlayOnLinux (Wine 1.5.21 version):

This time, the game installs fine and with a couple of tricks, you can completely enjoy it with more than good performances. First of all, the feature Games for Windows LIVE should be disabled if you really want to play this game. How? Simple. Just download the appropriate DLL and extract it inside the main folder of the game (see below for the link). Then, there's a disturbing bug which causes blinking screen while playing, but there's an easy solution. Just edit your ~/.wine/drive_c/users//My Documents/CAPCOM/SFTK/config.ini, and under [SYSTEM] change RenderingThread=ON to RenderingThread=OFF. Easy, huh? Final step: videos don't work. I missed how to solve this issue in my video, but i'm gonna tell you here how to do that. If you're using Wine without Playonlinux, open a terminal and type "winetricks wmp9 quartz devenum", then download K-Lite Codec Pack and install it (open a terminal, type "wine K-Lite_Codec_Pack_970_Basic.exe" and follow the instructions). If you're using Playonlinux, click on SFXT shortcut, click on configure, go under "install components" and install wmp9, quartz and devenum packages, then download K-Lite Codec Pack and install it in the same virtual drive as SFXT. Then you can play your game! So:

- Download this DLL and put it inside the main directory of the game: http://megagames.com/fixes/street-fighter-x-tekken-v10-all-no-dvd-theta
- Edit your ~/.wine/drive_c/users//My Documents/CAPCOM/SFTK/config.ini, and under [SYSTEM] change RenderingThread=ON to RenderingThread=OFF
- Type "winetricks wmp9 quartz devenum" in a terminal, download K-Lite Codec Pack (basic version) from http://codecguide.com/download_k-lite_codec_pack_basic.htm, and type "wine K-Lite_Codec_Pack_970_Basic.exe" in a terminal, if you use Wine without Playonlinux. Otherwise, click on SFXT shortcut, click on configure, go under "install components" and install wmp9, quartz and devenum packages, then download K-Lite Codec Pack from the same link as above and install it in the same virtual drive as SFXT.

Are you happy? Say YEAH!

Talking about performances...

First of all, my hardware:

agp_aperture_size: 256
cpu: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor
cpu_ghz: 0.80
distro: Ubuntu 12.10 quantal
kernel: 3.5.0-22-generic
machine_bitness: 64
memory: 3953
soundcard: HDA ATI SB at 0xfbcf4000 irq 16
soundcard_driver: ALSA Version 1.0.25
videocard_direct: True
videocard_driver_version: 4.3.0 NVIDIA 310.14
videocard_manufacturer: NVIDIA Corporation
videocard_ram: 1024
videocard_type: GeForce GTX 550 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
x_version: X.Org X Server 1.13.0

This game is a bit heavy, especially on high quality, but it is greatly playable by anybody with a good hardware. I also suggest the latest closed source drivers of your graphic card.
Let's see how it works on Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit and on Windows 7 64-bit.

Low quality

Medium quality

High quality

Of course we couldn't expect something else. The game works fine on Windows, and on Linux there are no significant differences between medium and high quality. There is a big boost on low quality, but in this way there are no landscapes, what you see is just the characters on a black background. It's too ugly to be played like this. So if you got a powerful hardware, go with high quality and play the game.

Conclusion: use PlayOnLinux/Wine.

Installation:



The process takes about 15 minutes, included post-installation tricks.

Running:



That's all. Feel free to send me an email or leave a comment if you got some problems or if you just wanna ask me a question. I will always answer you!