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I'm on gentoo, and these are my observations of both PSOBB and FFXI retail (same crackling):
  • Raw ALSA, Pulseaudio, Pipewire makes no difference whatsoever. Tried troubleshooting each and no particular config change made a significant difference.
  • Rather what seems to make the biggest different is whether the wine version you're using uses the staging patchset or not.
On FFXI:
  • wine-proton-7.0-5 and wine-vanilla-8.2 (no staging patches) have no crackle and work perfectly. wine-staging-8.2 has crackle. Lutris' inbuilt wine versions all (that I tried and remember) have crackle, so I assume they use the staging patchset too.
On PSOBB:
  • Staging/lutris versions seem required to get the launcher to actually work (unless this is some weird gecko or dotnet version nonsense on my end), but cause crackle in game. wine-proton 7.0-5 can't get into the launcher but can get into the game and has no crackle. Thanks to lutris (and gentoo's slotting) it's easy enough to switch wine versions if I have to go into the launcher for something, but it's still a pain. Also, neither the launcher nor the game work with wine-vanilla-8.2. Must be a regression in there. Tried wine-vanilla-7.0.1 and the launcher process starts but the actual window never shows up. Like wine-proton it can get ingame, but unlike proton the game gets stuck on a black screen.
I'll experiment a little more with some of the earlier wine-vanilla and wine-staging versions available in the gentoo repos (my CPU is getting a hell of a workout today) but my hopes are pretty low on finding a version that both works with the launcher AND the game exe itself with no crackle. I should also try a fresh 64bit prefix with wine-vanilla-8.2, I suppose...
 
Hi all. I have recently spent some time getting Ephinea and Ultima running on Arch Linux (KDE Plasma + Wayland) with Bottles. It's been by far the most reliable method for playing so far. What's more is that Bottles seems to be made with reproducible environments as a primary focus. Lutris has had more issues with managing state. The installer in the Lutris database fails completely on my machine.

There are still a few bugs to iron out. There are some issues with the textures on the terminals and probably a handful of other places, but overall it looks pretty good.

For context, I am running on a HP 15-ef1027ca. It's a Ryzen 3250U based machine, so it's running an integrated Vega 3. The GPU stays pretty cool when running and doesn't really start to chug until I turn up anti-aliasing. I did have audio crackling issues with some wine versions under Lutris but have not had any audio issues since I switched to using Bottles.

Appended:
After some more experimenting, running the game with D3D12 seems to fix the texture issues with the terminals. There is some very minor popping in the audio but I'm not sure if it's present in the original game. I would need to compare against the GC version.

The biggest problem though, in my opinion, is the quality of the character shadows. They're completely atrocious and I actually notice how bad they look in game. I don't remember seeing shadows in the GameCube version?
 
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Well, they are just really low resolution...it was hard to tell on Gamecube because it too was running at a relatively low resolution. Audio popping is not native and is an issue with something in Arch (Wine or audio engine, ask Matt cause I forgot already)

I believe EP2 did not have enemy shadows (though Ep3 does, neat.) Multimode also changed the shadows to blobs for performance gains (I don't actually remember the latter, just noticing on screen shots.) You should be able to get Gamecube shadows by setting Shadows to low in the options. Or just turn them off if you don't want em.
 
Hi all. I have recently spent some time getting Ephinea and Ultima running on Arch Linux (KDE Plasma + Wayland) with Bottles. It's been by far the most reliable method for playing so far. What's more is that Bottles seems to be made with reproducible environments as a primary focus. Lutris has had more issues with managing state. The installer in the Lutris database fails completely on my machine.

There are still a few bugs to iron out. There are some issues with the textures on the terminals and probably a handful of other places, but overall it looks pretty good.

For context, I am running on a HP 15-ef1027ca. It's a Ryzen 3250U based machine, so it's running an integrated Vega 3. The GPU stays pretty cool when running and doesn't really start to chug until I turn up anti-aliasing. I did have audio crackling issues with some wine versions under Lutris but have not had any audio issues since I switched to using Bottles.

Appended:
After some more experimenting, running the game with D3D12 seems to fix the texture issues with the terminals. There is some very minor popping in the audio but I'm not sure if it's present in the original game. I would need to compare against the GC version.

The biggest problem though, in my opinion, is the quality of the character shadows. They're completely atrocious and I actually notice how bad they look in game. I don't remember seeing shadows in the GameCube version?
I thought wine games that were capped to less than 60fps were really choppy on Wayland, are you not getting that? I got it when I tried FFXI on it last year.
 
In Temple (PSOGC) enemies have shadows. Not sure about the rest of Ep.2 as it's been a while since I last played it in its entirety...

GPOP8P_2023-03-31_21-28-42.png
 
I thought wine games that were capped to less than 60fps were really choppy on Wayland, are you not getting that? I got it when I tried FFXI on it last year.
Nope. No problems. Some rare lag and sometimes a couple of dropped frames at worst. It seems like Wine use to run under xwayland. They've started running natively so they don't have to deal with weird latency problems.
 
Nope. No problems. Some rare lag and sometimes a couple of dropped frames at worst. It seems like Wine use to run under xwayland. They've started running natively so they don't have to deal with weird latency problems.
Ahh, I knew wayland wine was in the works but it must've been implemented in a quite recent version. When I tried FFXI on wayland it was still through xwayland and it had some bizarre glitchy tearing that looked like GPU death throes.

Well, that's one of the 3 things stopping me from using Wayland fixed. Nice.
 
In case anyone wants the Bottles configuration I've found works best, here it is:

YAML:
---
Arch: win64
CompatData: ''
Creation_Date: '2023-03-23 22:21:08.102512'
Custom_Path: false
DLL_Overrides: {}
DXVK: dxvk-2.1-1-d14dcf5
Environment: Gaming
Environment_Variables: {}
External_Programs: {}
Installed_Dependencies:
- d3dx9
- msls31
- arial32
- times32
- courie32
- d3dcompiler_43
- d3dcompiler_47
- dotnet40
- dotnet45
- dotnet46
- vcredist2015
- dotnet461
- dotnet462
Language: sys
LatencyFleX: latencyflex-v0.1.1
NVAPI: dxvk-nvapi-v0.6.2
Name: Ephinea Blue Burst
Parameters:
    custom_dpi: 96
    decorated: true
    discrete_gpu: true
    dxvk: true
    dxvk_nvapi: false
    fixme_logs: false
    fsr: false
    fsr_quality_mode: none
    fsr_sharpening_strength: 2
    fullscreen_capture: false
    gamemode: false
    gamescope: false
    gamescope_borderless: false
    gamescope_fps: 0
    gamescope_fps_no_focus: 0
    gamescope_fullscreen: true
    gamescope_game_height: 0
    gamescope_game_width: 0
    gamescope_scaling: false
    gamescope_window_height: 0
    gamescope_window_width: 0
    latencyflex: false
    mangohud: false
    mouse_warp: true
    obsvkc: false
    pulseaudio_latency: false
    renderer: gl
    sandbox: false
    sync: esync
    take_focus: false
    use_be_runtime: true
    use_eac_runtime: true
    use_runtime: false
    use_steam_runtime: false
    versioning_automatic: false
    versioning_compression: false
    versioning_exclusion_patterns: false
    virtual_desktop: false
    virtual_desktop_res: 1280x720
    vkbasalt: false
    vkd3d: true
    vmtouch: false
    vmtouch_cache_cwd: false
Path: Ephinea-Blue-Burst
Runner: soda-7.0-9
RunnerPath: ''
Sandbox:
    share_net: false
    share_sound: false
State: 0
Uninstallers: {}
Update_Date: '2023-04-11 13:12:38.200059'
VKD3D: vkd3d-proton-2.8-1-b7fb41b
Versioning: false
Versioning_Exclusion_Patterns: []
Windows: winxp
WorkingDir: ''
data: {}
run_in_terminal: false
session_arguments: ''
...
 
Reinstalled recently after heading back to Arch, and some of my game's sound effects seem to be missing. Boxes break silently, Shifta misses one of its SEs. Then again my audio has felt slightly "off" since returning to Arch in general, perhaps it's unrelated to the game.

EDIT: Nevermind, it was the specific wine version I was using in Lutris.
EDIT EDIT: Nope that didn't fix it, it just takes a while to "break"

Meh. I'll leave getting back into the game til Debian Bookworm drops and I switch to that.

EDIT EDIT EDIT: Went back to Debian early and the game works fine. Huh.
 
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