Age of Empires

What works

Install from a freshly made cdrdao BIN/TOC dump of the Xplosiv-branded budget release of Age of Empires Gold I picked up a few years ago.

Starting a single-player skirmish and playing for a few minutes

Changing the game resolution to the maximum 1024x768 supported

(In a 32-bit wineprefix)

What does not

1. The installer doesn't work on modern Windows and you'll get an error message about requiring at least Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3.

2. You'll get an MCI Error saying "There is an undetectable problem in loading the specified device driver" during the opening videos and get stuck at a black screen when you launch the Rise of Rome side of Age of Empires Gold.

Workarounds

1. Use winecfg to change the Windows Version from Windows 7 to Windows XP.

2. Run EMPIRESX.EXE with the "NoStartup" command-line argument to skip the opening cinematic that causes the error.

What was not tested

Multiplayer

Playing the skirmish to completion.

64-bit wineprefixes

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Nvidia
• Driver: proprietary

Additional Comments

1. X11 window managers are prone to getting confused and scrambling up your window layout on resolution changes that are meant to be temporary, so you may want to enable a virtual desktop in winecfg to prevent the game from actually changing your resolution.

2. Age of Empires Gold doesn't have the CD Audio tracks from the separate 1.0 releases of its component parts, so, if you're not using UPatch HD to add MP3 background music, you'll need an ALSA midi synthesizer to hear music.

Given that PulseAudio tends to be configured as a user service such that system services can't play to it, you won't want to run any software MIDI synth as a system service.

If you're using Timidity++, the simplest solution is to run `timidity -iA` in a terminal before launching the game. If you still get no MIDI, make sure Wine is configured to send MIDI to the proper device.