Alex Builds His Farm & Laura's Happy Adventures Widescreen

[lk19]

I tried your fix for the old version of the game, it makes my game really slow + it's crashes whenever I try to open the gate in front of the house (the music's still playing but Laura is frozen in front of the gate). It's not specific to your fix tho, it's D3D which's causing that. I have to launch the game with the Glide exe & 3DFX to be able to play (but whithout your fix then).

It's kind of funny beacause with Hype I can play with D3D but 3DFX is slow and crasing. Does it really change anything anyway?

I would like to try it on Laura P3 version but the game doesn't work with AMD processor.
Right now it's displaying an error "Streaming SIMD Extension not detected. This Game requires at least a PIII to run".

Do you think it's possible to bypass that?

Honestly, I found the "old" version of Laura quite unstable, myself. Most of the time, I get graphical issues with the "gem" in the inventory screen, and also the inventory items are missing from the backpack. If these glitches occur, the game usually crashes after some time on the inventory screen Funny enough, this does NOT ALWAYS happen. Sometimes the inventory screen works just fine This seems to have nothing to do with my patch (as it also happens in the unpatched version) and seems to be independent of the Direct3D wrapper (happens with both dgVoodoo and DDrawCompat).

I'm not sure what the issue with AMD processors is, and I can't really test it right now since I have an Intel. But I'll look into it at some point (unfortunately, I'm quite busy at the moment )

[PluMGMK]

Which specific AMD processor is the issue with?

[Ftwtv]

I tried your fix for the old version of the game, it makes my game really slow + it's crashes whenever I try to open the gate in front of the house (the music's still playing but Laura is frozen in front of the gate). It's not specific to your fix tho, it's D3D which's causing that. I have to launch the game with the Glide exe & 3DFX to be able to play (but whithout your fix then).

It's kind of funny beacause with Hype I can play with D3D but 3DFX is slow and crasing. Does it really change anything anyway?

I would like to try it on Laura P3 version but the game doesn't work with AMD processor.
Right now it's displaying an error "Streaming SIMD Extension not detected. This Game requires at least a PIII to run".

Do you think it's possible to bypass that?

Honestly, I found the "old" version of Laura quite unstable, myself. Most of the time, I get graphical issues with the "gem" in the inventory screen, and also the inventory items are missing from the backpack. If these glitches occur, the game usually crashes after some time on the inventory screen Funny enough, this does NOT ALWAYS happen. Sometimes the inventory screen works just fine This seems to have nothing to do with my patch (as it also happens in the unpatched version) and seems to be independent of the Direct3D wrapper (happens with both dgVoodoo and DDrawCompat).

I'm not sure what the issue with AMD processors is, and I can't really test it right now since I have an Intel. But I'll look into it at some point (unfortunately, I'm quite busy at the moment )

I too noticed both graphical glitches and a lot of crashes, especially when loading a new zone or going on the inventory screen. I'm a bit relieved you're confirming it's the old version that's instable, I thought it was my fault for messing with game files too much. I just changed the game.mem files (as stated in pcgamewiki) but I need to test it and see if it improved anything.

Don't worry about the P3 issue, I was just asking in case you would know or have a bit of spare times. It's already great if you can look into it in some times (I'll just have to remember to come check here and pcgamewiki haha).

Honestly I didn't think there was people trying to get this game working nowadays, I thought it had fallen into the oblivion with Alex (and Hype in a lesser extend).

Which specific AMD processor is the issue with?

It seems to be all AMD processor and even some Intel, you can find more information here:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=76766

In my case I got an AMD Ryzen 5 1600.

[PluMGMK]

Great. It's probably got a hardcoded check for the CPUID returning "GenuineIntel" Well, if that is the case, it should be easy enough to patch...

[lk19]

I would like to try it on Laura P3 version but the game doesn't work with AMD processor.
Right now it's displaying an error "Streaming SIMD Extension not detected. This Game requires at least a PIII to run".

Do you think it's possible to bypass that?

Maybe you could try the "Fake Pentium III" option in DxWnd. It looks like this has been created specifically for Laura's Happy Adventures

Also have look at the corresponding discussion here: https://sourceforge.net/p/dxwnd/discuss ... eb1971274/
It mentions using the "Limit video memory" tweak for the "old" version (not needed for the Pentium III version). Maybe this or some other tweak helps with the stability issues

[lk19]

Hey everyone!

Here's a new EXPERIMENTAL version of the Alex widescreen patch. Based on my work on Rayman 2, I was able to fix the following things:

• Un-stretched (almost) every HUD + menu item and placed them within a centered 4:3 rectangle.
• Un-stretched the loading screens and menu backgrounds.

The EXE is pre-patched and in order to run it, you must set a resolution of 1280x720 in ubi.ini. If you want to set the resolution to any other value, you can use the attached python script. Just run it inside the same directory as the pre-patched Alex_D3D.exe. Unfortunately, I haven't had the time yet to make a proper python script to create the patch from a fresh, un-patched EXE (this could then potentially be used for other versions of the game). So I'm afraid this patch is for the European English/French/German release only. However... you might just want to try it with other localized versions... maybe it just works

Known issues: The little preview images and the save-file names on the savegame loading screen are still misplaced. I'm sure I'll find a way to fix this

If you have any other issues with this patch, please let me know

[AlphaYellow]

Hey everyone!

Here's a new EXPERIMENTAL version of the Alex widescreen patch. Based on my work on Rayman 2, I was able to fix the following things:

• Un-stretched (almost) every HUD + menu item and placed them within a centered 4:3 rectangle.
• Un-stretched the loading screens and menu backgrounds.

The EXE is pre-patched and in order to run it, you must set a resolution of 1280x720 in ubi.ini. If you want to set the resolution to any other value, you can use the attached python script. Just run it inside the same directory as the pre-patched Alex_D3D.exe. Unfortunately, I haven't had the time yet to make a proper python script to create the patch from a fresh, un-patched EXE (this could then potentially be used for other versions of the game). So I'm afraid this patch is for the European English/French/German release only. However... you might just want to try it with other localized versions... maybe it just works

Known issues: The little preview images and the save-file names on the savegame loading screen are still misplaced. I'm sure I'll find a way to fix this

If you have any other issues with this patch, please let me know

Really cool, no more stretched images on menus Although I noticed the credits text is still stretched and out of view of the now unstretched background images. Also the text and image for the new game menu are still misplaced, like you said

[lk19]

Hey everyone. I've finally managed to finish the Alex Builds his Farm Widescreen Fix. It should now be able to un-stretch every background, HUD element and text. It also reads the resolution from ubi.ini, so there is no more need to run any Python script to change the EXE file

The patch was made for the European English/French/German release, but should also work with other versions (I tested it with the Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese versions). It does NOT work with the Pentium III version (apparently this exists... only heard of it recently).

The patch comes in two versions (in case someone actually prefers the stretched HUD elements and backgrounds):

Version A:

• Removes the CD check
• Reads ubi.ini DIRECTLY from the game's directory rather than <WinDir>\Ubisoft
• Fixes the placement of the "green bar" (HUD element) on resolutions other than 640x480
• Corrects the FOV so that the vertical FOV matches the one in the original 4:3 aspect ratio

Version B:

• Everything that version A does
• Un-stretches menu backgrounds and loading screens (they are centered with black bars on the sides)
• Un-stretches 2D HUD elements
• Un-stretches text (e.g. in the game's credits)

For the sake of documentation, I've also included the Python script, if someone is intersted in the technical details...

[PluMGMK]

Just reposting this here in case anyone reading this topic might know the answer but not normally read the Off Topic forum:

Hello!

I was wondering if anyone knew how to rip the audio for the voice lines (and potentially sound effects and musics)?
I've used VGStream on the Bnk_<1-50>.bnm files, but it's not all of the voice lines. I'm not sure where, and how to get all the missing files.
Any help would be appreciated

[lk19]

Hi everyone. Just wanted to let you know that I have released a new ASI version of the widescreen patch for Alex Builds His Farm. You can find it here: https://github.com/lukek19/CPAGameFixes/releases

Features:

• Works with both the original and Pentium III version of the game.
• Doesn't require the CD to be in the disc drive.
• Reads ubi.ini directly from the game directory.
• Allows for TMPFixMemory and TMPLevelMemory to be set in the fix's own ini file. No more hex-editing gamemem.bin to avoid crashes at larger resolutions!
• Has the option to either center the HUD + background images (e.g. loading screens) or have everything stretched.
• Fixes some x-resolution related bugs in the original game (the "green bar" and the load bar would be offset when using an x-resolution != 640, even though the original game already allowed you to set it to 800 or 1024).

[ElZboub]

Thank you so much for your work! I've been dreaming of a widescreen patch for the Pentium III version of Alex ever since I discovered the existence of this version!