I'm really just looking for ways to waste my time, aren't I?

[elfs]

Yes, that's Cortana's ass

Sweet! After a little experimentation, Halo runs great on Linux! The only headache is that the mouse is way, way too sensitive, but a mouse-tuning front-end fixed that. Also, the game slows down a lot when drawing big scenes, so maybe turning off some of the special effects would be a good idea. Still, the resolution is far better than my old desktop, which makes me very happy.

Comments

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

Care to share the details?

I seem to remember you talking about getting FreeSpace 2 running under linux (after swapping out the memory management routines, if I remember correctly). Do you happen to know when that post was made?

Thanks for any info you care to provide...

[elfs.livejournal.com]

June 17, 2005 (http://elfs.livejournal.com/327635.html) and November 25, 2006 (http://elfs.livejournal.com/543930.html). The latter fix, I should note, has been incorporated into the SDL and the Linux kernel, so it's not an issue. It's the first fix, with the memory management issue, that as far as I know still crops up with some instances of GlibC.

As for running Halo, I'm running Wine version 1.1.26, with this script (in bin/halo):

XSET=`xset q | grep acceleration | perl -ne 'm{acceleration.\s+(\d+).*?threshold.\s+(\d+)}; print "$1 $2\n"'`
cd ~/wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Microsoft\ Games/Halo
xset m 1 1
wine halo.exe 2> /dev/null
xset m $XSET

The first line just rips the current mouse settings and saves them, and the last line puts them back. That fixed my mouse "overdrive" problem nicely. It apparently comes because I have a thinkpad, and the USB mouse I use for gaming is read differently from either the trackpad of the little red nipple pointer controls on thinkpads.