Comments - Ishusteedus

You're very welcome. I'm glad we could get it working.

DSP basically means a sound card or device. Before pulseaudio, Linux software that produced sound would send its sound output to ALSA's dsp. ALSA gives them basic device names like dsp0 for the first sound card/device, dsp1 for the second, etc. Whichever one ALSA is told is default is the one the output gets sent to. But most sound devices don't natively handle multiple sound streams at the same time, so without software mixing only one program could hold the dsp at any one time. ALSA does have a primitive software mixer, but it usually wasn't enabled by default on most distributions for latency reasons and most didn't even know it was there. A few noble, but bad attempts at sound servers (like esd and aRTs) were made until the pulseaudio project began. pulseaudio grabs the sound device then allows programs that use it to pipe everything to pulseaudio, which then mixes the signal and sends it to the dsp.

But software that wasn't written to work with pulseaudio won't find it and won't play sound because pulseaudio is holding the dsp. So pulseaudio gives you the nifty utility padsp that takes another program as an argument, and tries to trick that program into seeing pulseaudio *as* the dsp, so it sends sound to it instead of ALSA.

I guess this is the problem with Faerie Solitaire on Linux and it also explains why I didn't have the problem. To be fair, it's not pulseaudio's fault. I don't like pulseaudio and use an old SoundBlaster with a hardware mixer so I don't need it, but it does exactly what it set out to do and makes Linux audio a heck of a lot easier for most users. In this case, it's really the developer who should make sure their Linux port checks for pulseaudio.

By the way, that's why the Windows version works in Wine when the native version does not: current versions of Wine are made to look for pulseaudio and anything running through Wine will send audio to the right place because of it.

I'm a stubborn SOB. Not ready to give up quite yet.

I looked again at what you had written before about libstdc++. At the time, I hadn't yet looked and saw that I get the same output as you but for that and it didn't really hit me. It looks like the game is trying to use JACK audio. So you obviously have JACK installed. I don't know if you have it running or not.

Do you have pulseaudio installed? If so, try running the game with the command:

padsp FaerieSolitaire

If you do not have pulseaudio installed or don't have it running, try:

aoss FaerieSolitaire

That second one emulates the old Open Sound System which has long since been deprecated, but I'm hoping (and this is really just a guess) that it'll force the game to try going straight to ALSA's dsp. Mainly, I'm wondering if the attempt to use JACK is what's messing it up. I do have JACK installed, but I only run it when I'm playing or recording music. Anyway, it's a stab in the dark.

I also have dual monitors, using nVidia's TwinView. The only issue with that is that trying to make it fullscreen does funky stuff to it unless I change to a metamode where one monitor is off. So I play in windowed mode. Beyond that, though, no issues. Not saying it's not worth considering, just that in my case it's okay.

There seems to be an error log in the "FaerieSolitaire data" directory called "anaconda.log". Does that suggest anything to you?

This might sound a bit random, but if you know how, look through .settings (the period at the beginning is important) within the main desura directory with `ls -l` and make sure the ownership/permissions look right. Don't do anything else to the files. I've never had this problem with Desura, but if I'm having trouble figuring out why something's not running, it's just habit for me to look at permissions to see if I or some errant program has done something funky to them. I don't think it's likely here, but if you already know what to look for and it wouldn't be a huge pain, it doesn't hurt.

Okay, I just tried it myself from the command line and this was the output:

Starting up player...
Error loading libfluidsynth.so.1: libfluidsynth.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Error loading libdumb.so: libdumb.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
(mmfparser took 10.1572680473)
(unknown chunk 8775)
AL lib: pulseaudio.c:485: Context did not connect: Connection refused

It still ran exactly as it should. I should explain that last line: I removed pulseaudio for numerous reasons. Doesn't matter. I still had sound, so it tries it if it's there and then just sends to the audio device otherwise. This is what it should do, so no problem.

Have you tried simply running it from Desura now that you've made those changes? How long do you wait once you see the output you described before giving up?

And I don't mind long posts. People who don't like reading should watch TV. The internet is not good for avoiding reading.

*edit: The mention of pulseaudio was in no way meant to advise removing pulseaudio. I seriously doubt that this is the problem.

That's perfect. You should be able to find the packages "mpg123" and "libfluidsynth1" in Synaptic. The only thing I could find on LibDump is a project page on codeguru describing it as "LibDump is a Win32 utility tool similar to Microsoft's DumpBin utility except that it can be used to display the contents of library files instead of portable executables and COFF (Common Object File Format) .OBJ files." Oddly enough, I don't even have it myself and it's nowhere in the faerie-solitaire directories, so I'm guessing it's not absolutely necessary.

Try installing those two packages and giving it a run.

Note to developer: Both of the above libraries (I'm not sure about LibDump) are released under the LGPL, so it's possible to distribute them with your closed source game under provisions.

I'm running an older version of Linux than you (openSUSE 11.4) and had no troubles. That said, maybe we could figure it out. Have you run it from the command line to see what error messages it gives?

Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait...

How is that outfit even staying ON? How is it... *holding* anything? I understand fan service and all that, but... did she glue that to herself?

You'd have a super good point if Bill Gates ever wrote an operating system. Instead, he bought something that might or might not have even fit the definition and "improved" it (i.e., got a sweet deal with IBM to include it on their breakout computer). What came of it was possibly the most primitive computer operating system of its time that did very little but often broke anyway. After that, he "designed operating systems" about as much as Bob Dudley "works on oil drills".

On the other hand, John Carmack wrote a game from scratch so awesome that it affected everything since for better or for worse. And he did it with all the crappy limitations built in to that operating system Bill Gates "designed".