Wine, pulseaudio, Starcraft problems

[Richard Shaw]

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 7:52 PM, Reid Rivenburgh <reidr at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 3:29 PM, stan <gryt2 at q.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:27:22 -0600
>> Reid Rivenburgh <reidr at pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>>> To follow up, I did manage to get wine to use alsa (it's important to
>>> install the i686 packages as well as x86_64), but it's still running
>>> very slowly for me.  So I have sound in the game but still just a few
>>> (< 5) frames per second.  I'm pretty sure pulseaudio is out of the
>>> equation now, so I'm not sure what else could be wrong.  Even with
>>> alsa, the audio is a little choppy.  At least it's playable and the
>>> sound never cuts out.  (It's the same with a different account, by the
>>> way.)
>>
>> It sounds to me like alsa might be doing rate conversion. That is, the
>> alsa device has been opened at one rate, say 44100 frames/second, and
>> the game is playing audio which requires 48000 frames/second.  The
>> higher the numbers are, the more conversion work the CPU has to do in a
>> shorter time, and that could impact your user experience.
>
> I did try specifying 48000 in winecfg (which I assume is where you
> mean I should fiddle with it), and it seems to have helped a little
> bit.  The sound seemed a little less choppy.  But for some reason, it
> starts out fine and gets a little worse over the course of a few
> minutes.
>
>> It is also possible that there is something running in the background
>> that doesn't have a low enough priority and is preventing the interrupt
>> for alsa from operating in a timely manner.  I think there is a way to
>> set niceness so that alsa is very high priority, a config file
>> in /etc.  Can't remember the name, a search should turn it up.
>
> I'll do some more digging on that.
>
>> The wine api that pretends it is the sound device in windows might also
>> be causing a problem in some way as it passes the data through to linux.

When I was trying to get WINE to behave I would sometime rename my
.wine to back it up and start over. That let me know if it was
something I screwed up in the configuration. Sometime copying to files
from one to the other worked, other times I had to reinstall. Drastic,
but it's a good last resort. And you can always move it back without
loosing anything.

Richard