Hi All,
I read that Wine works only with ALSA, but the new OpenSuSE 11.0 is based on PulseAudio, in fact the audio in the games doesn’t work…
How can i do to make working the audio in Wine Games (games:Call of Duty 1 and 2, Half Life 2 and Source-based games…)?
Thanks in advance,
The ALSA sound system is used with all contemporary versions of linux including openSUSE 11, but PulsAudio is a new sound server bundled with openSUSE11.
Last I had read, wine (beta releases) dose not work with the Pulse Audio for ALSA (called alsa-pulse), … at least not for direct Sound. I get that from here: PerfectSetup - PulseAudio - Trac
To quote:
The ALSA output in Wine (beta releases) does not work with the PulseAudio plugin for ALSA (called alsa-pulse) currently, at least not for DirectSound. See this bug report for Wine and this report for PulseAudio .
If it does not work to route the audio through ALSA, perhaps Wine will work better if it uses the OSS or ESD procol between Wine and PulseAudio.
Distributions like Ubuntu 8.04 is set up so that the default ALSA “device” is pulse, i.e. the PulseAudio plugin for ALSA. Furthermore PulseAudio will take control over the hardware to avoid the use of dmix (better latency, less compatible with things like Winealsa).
If a gamer wants lowest possible latency, and does not need any other app to play sound (like voice chats like “Teamspeak”), then they should use pasuspender. This makes PulseAudio release the hardware interface, so a game can use it exclusively, and without dmix or PulseAudio in between.
Winealsa is now ( some time before may 4. 2008) fixed, so it uses the alsa device “default” instead of “default:0” (or like numbers), and does not require a volume control called PCM but uses the default volume control.
If you find that a bit confusing, … so do I. I think Gnome in openSUSE-11 uses pulse audio more than KDE-3.5.9, and on my PC, with me being very conservative, I installed KDE-3.5.9. Hence I am still trying to learn about Pulse Audio (which may take me a few months), and I am not really able to help users much here. Hopefully others on this forum, can pick up the slack.
I just updated that guide earlier today, trying to clarify a bit the differences between ALSA, aRts, ESD, GStreamer, JACK and Xine. I also added some more minor clarifications wrt Pulse Audio.
But that concepts page still needs some work.
And I need to turn my theoretical into practical. Hopefully the community will work together to help pickup the slack, and improve the overall knowledge, experience, and practical work arounds with pulse audio. I think it is here to stay.