Pages

Monday, December 24, 2007

Lego Star Wars - Problems with wide screen

A little while ago I bought Lego Star Wars to join my other copy, Lego Star Wars II.
There were initially some problems getting the joystick to play nice, but after removing the override settings in the joystick configuration and deleting the SWLEGO.BIN file, everything was sweet.

Until I noticed issues with the screen resolution. You don’t actually get to select what sort of wide screen you want to display, some how it just picks it up for you. I would set the screen detail to max (1600×1200), quit, start the game up and somehow, it was displaying 1920×1200. I could tell because it wasn’t shifting my wallpaper on my second screen like some low res games do (Starcraft for example).
You would think this would be alright. Except the next day when I would play the game, it wasn’t wide screen anymore. It wasn’t even 1600×1200. It was back to the simple 640×480 mode. When I set it back to 1600×1200, quit and re-open: it would be at 1600×1200. I was missing out on the wide screen.

Solution
After deleting the SWLEGO.BIN file a few more times and making sure that it was reproducible (at least on my machine) I worked out that I could copy a certain version of the SWLEGO.BIN file (when I had changed to 1600×1200 for the first time) and it would start up at the right resolution with widescreen. I was about to head over to the Batch file section on the wiki to write me a script that would do the copy automatically (not much really) when it dawned on my *make the file read only*. In the process, I was concerned that if the program was writing to this file on startup, a read only config file may cause it to barf. But it didn’t. It’s great. As long as I don’t have to change anything else I should be set.

Finding help on the game has been a little difficult, as the official website http://www.legostarwarsthevideogame.com/ doesn’t seem to be configured.
The first time I visited http://www.eidos.com/ to see if there were any patches or forums I was running into trouble on a) how to find the game and b) where are the on the page are the downloads. On second viewing (when writing this post), it seems a little more accessible.

One thing I found funny in the readme
Make sure you do not have any Anti-Virus utilities (like Norton’s AntiVirus) running resident prior to playing LEGO Star Wars.

Is this really the sort of things that professional companies should be pushing?

Anyway, I hope that someone else finds this interesting. I’ll see if I can raise a bug with eidos or possibly decode the binary file to find out why it is forgetting the screen resolution.

1 comment:

  1. I didn't know deleting the SWLEGO.BIN file could solve some problems, but I read it here and it solved mine, so thanks! =)

    ReplyDelete