Radio Freeze Linux/Proton

[Jericho]

Playing Fallout 3 on Linux Mint 18.3 with steamplay
Can play GNR and Enclave radio and hear three dog and the "President". No music.
If I tune into a station for one of the radio towers you can turn on, game freezes. Have to kill the process.

Found a few threads but it seems a bit jumbled as they all seem to deal with a radio stutter issue that is unrelated. Think it might be the specific audio files that gives some problems when trying to use certain radio stations.

No mods, straight installation. DId have to copy paste xlive.dll to get past the launcher.

[bradleypariah]

I have this problem too. Did you ever solve it?

[Lucifer69]

I'm pretty sure it has to do with an improper codec for MP3 (the compression type FO3 uses for music). Windows Player has trouble playing them as well.

From what I can see, there is no possible fix. The odd thing is I don't have issues with the radio myself (ParrotOS and Proton).

[Jericho]

Unfortunately no, gave up eventually and played avoiding those stations.

[bradleypariah]

Originally posted by Lucifer69:

From what I can see, there is no possible fix. The odd thing is I don't have issues with the radio myself (ParrotOS and Proton).

I would think that since it works for you, we must simply have different libraries or codecs from one another. Do you have FFMPEG or some other codec library installed?

[bradleypariah]

Originally posted by Jericho:

Unfortunately no, gave up eventually and played avoiding those stations.

Perhaps I should download one of those Conelrad stations from Nexus.

[Lucifer69]

Evidently adding quartz.dll is a possible solution. Maybe that's what I did. This has been some time ago.

[bradleypariah]

Originally posted by Lucifer69:

Evidently adding quartz.dll is a possible solution. Maybe that's what I did. This has been some time ago.

Hmmm... Care to elaborate? Where did you get this file? -and where did you paste it?

[Lucifer69]

It's a DirectX subroutine for Windows Media Player. It seems to add some compatibility to Windows in regards to radio/ music playback.

[bradleypariah]

I don't know if this is a codec issue, because I've discovered that the the radios on dressers and desks in the environment play the music just fine. It's only my PipBoy that won't play music. Perhaps there's something wrong with the way Proton overlays the static on radio stations.

[Lucifer69]

I've never really investigated it, and I doubt you could find much. I can tell you that the MP3 codec used is almost incompatible with Windows Media Player. It takes some tweaks, and quartz, just to get the thing to play those files (extracted for testing purposes only).

Maybe there's some other issue with the game, gamebryo, or something else that raises hell with VM. It seems to work well enough for me on Wine, atm, but I also didn't have many issues with Proton. Technically, only W:XP and Vista are supported, as W7 didn't even exist until a year after FO3's release. Linux was never on the menu, and still isn't for the modern day Bethesda.

[bradleypariah]

Originally posted by Lucifer69:

I can tell you that the MP3 codec used is almost incompatible with Windows Media Player. It takes some tweaks, and quartz

I still don't know what you're talking about with quartz. I wish you elaborate.

Originally posted by Lucifer69:

It's a DirectX subroutine for Windows Media Player. It seems to add some compatibility to Windows in regards to radio/ music playback.

That doesn't really explain it, because Windows Media Player is not a part of Proton (is it?). I don't know where to obtain quartz, or how to add it to Fallout's prefix.

The only other idea I'm having is possibly unpckaing the music ESM files, then re-compressing the mp3s through Audacity one at a time, then re-packing them. Not sure how to do that on Linux either though.

[Gartral the Mystic Kitsune]

winetricks quartz will get quartz installed, then you can use winecfg to fiddle with which quartz you want it to use.

if you don't know how to use winetricks/winecfg with proton then google is your friend.