So this is fun... I can't find ANY information about the Pentium III version. You may want to back up both discs and upload them to archive.org.

It would probably be really easy to fix. I bet all that would need to be done is to edit the binary of the executable to jump past the CPU check.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-09-29, 00:19:

So this is fun... I can't find ANY information about the Pentium III version. You may want to back up both discs and upload them to archive.org.

I second this.

How strange! You'd think by the time the P3 was around that developers wouldn't be so shortsighted. I wonder if it's a custom installer, or otherwise how they integrated the CPU check?

In any case, there's always the old trick of running the installer in a virtual machine, and then copying the installed files to your normal installation, but it's not clear that would defeat the check either. (I don't think PCem supports any P3-based machine yet.)

Quick hex edit should do the trick.

Hey everybody !

Thank you so much for taking my request in concideration (^•^ )

cyclone3d wrote:

So this is fun... I can't find ANY information about the Pentium III version.

Maybe it's spcefic to french edition ? 😒
EDIT: Seem like it's for UK-GER-FR Edition, for US edition there is only one disc.
EDIT2: Also take a look here : https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/lauras … CoverId,407588/
It's in french sorry, but it's explaining the diffrences beetween the pink and the purple disc and system requirements for each (I'll also translate it later) Here is my translation !

(The purple disc is not in addition to the pink one. If you have a P3 or better, you should install the purple disc, otherwise use the pink)

cyclone3d wrote:

It would probably be really easy to fix. I bet all that would need to be done is to edit the binary of the executable to jump past the CPU check.

That's what I was thinking about. But this is a long time now since I've done such a thing and I'm pretty bad at it 😅

Jorpho wrote:

I wonder if it's a custom installer, or otherwise how they integrated the CPU check?

I think it's custom Ubisoft installer, not sure. Feel free to check with the iso files above :p

Jorpho wrote:

In any case, there's always the old trick of running the installer in a virtual machine, and then copying the installed files to your normal installation,

Already tried something like that (not exactly that procedure) but the game itself won't run and I get an error message like "You can't run the game anymore, because your system required changed." And list "CPU" as fault.

Thank you ^•^

/EDIT Removed "abandonware" links

The source of this trouble is the Ubi-Soft installer.
Looks like it uses the "CPU_ID Family_Code=0110" equation to detect PIIIs (EAX[11:8] after CPU_ID(EAX=1)). P4s have 1111 in this field and fails the check.

Gamecollector wrote on 2020-10-08, 02:43:

The source of this trouble is the Ubi-Soft installer.
Looks like it uses the "CPU_ID Family_Code=0110" equation to detect PIIIs (EAX[11:8] after CPU_ID(EAX=1)). P4s have 1111 in this field and fails the check.

Is that something that other installers have been known to do?

If that's all, then it should indeed be fairly simple to step through with a debugger and patch out the problem. (I'd love to read someone's walkthrough of the process. Maybe with that fancy new Ghidra? Alas, I don't have the time to take a whack at it at the moment.)

1) Can't find a decoding software for install scripts (InstData\ubiins.dat IIRC).
2) The check may be executed from a *.exe.

P. S. Pro Rally 2001 installer is affected too.

Slightly off topic, but I had a few MMX enhanced games which would work on P-MMX to PIII, but fail the MMX check on P4s.

Those dang P4s. 😜

Hey thank for your replies !

You know what ? I've never tried to install it on my Win 10 / Intel i5 6600K PC before... (I mean without a VM) Since now !
And what a suprise to see the installer accept the i5 as a P3 😮 !
So I managed to procMon the installtion, copied every single files and reg keys to my win98 / Intel P4 .... And it worked !

That's weird, beacause I already tried to make a "custom installation" (by modifying files on the CD-ROM .....)
The installation proceed well, but when I laucnhed the game I had the error telling me my hardware was modified and the game cannot run anymore 🤔

EDIT:

Gamecollector wrote:

The source of this trouble is the Ubi-Soft installer.
Looks like it uses the "CPU_ID Family_Code=0110" equation to detect PIIIs (EAX[11:8] after CPU_ID(EAX=1)). P4s have 1111 in this field and fails the check.

And after checking the family ID of the i5 6600K, it's 06h (so 0110 ^^)

The game's executable for the PIII version also seems to fail to launch on AMD CPUs, complaining about the lack of SSE...?

It was reported to me, but I don't have AMD hardware to test it.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2020-10-10, 06:28:

The game's executable for the PIII version also seems to fail to launch on AMD CPUs, complaining about the lack of SSE...?

It was reported to me, but I don't have AMD hardware to test it.

sorry to up this old topic but I have AMD cpus and game complain about the lack of SSE.

Anybody have a solution ?

I'd say edit it with OllyDbg in order to remove the test the game performs on SSE (since that test is flawed, and obsolete), but that's a bit involved.