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.
Ishusteedus
Constantinos joined
I'm a victim of soicumstance! It was sabatoogie!