Age of Empires does not play win7 home

[petrox]

Hi all, Need some guidance. I have tried many many web posts to make this older game work on Win7 home premium. No go hours and hours spent trying. The installs just fine then at the splash screen I get the ,,, game of empires has stopped working error message with the following detail: APPCRASH
Application Name: EMPIRES2.ICD
Application Version: 0.14.22.712
Application Timestamp: 3981d1df
Fault Module Name: dplayerx.DLL
Fault Module Version: 0.0.0.0
Fault Module Timestamp: 396602f5
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 00003a12
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: 989a
Additional Information 2: 989a2eece94c88e43d080999500de321
Additional Information 3: 4e7c
Additional Information 4: 4e7c87bbc1587161b2639bdf69eae17a

Does anyone have any ideas how to make this work? I have, as stated previously, tried many, many web posted fixes none of them with success. Regards Peter

[CLiNT]

Has your hardware passed the system check?
How to play Age of Empires II on Windows Vista and Windows 7
Windows 7 - windows 7 and age of empires III compatibility issue

http://download.microsoft.com/downlo...US/Age2upA.exe
(direct download link)

[petrox]

Hi CLiNT, yes I have checked it should work. I do not want to play online just single player. The system compatibility check says try recommended setting etc. I have tried all of them from win 98 through to Vista etc. All in all I have been at it for two month now. The thing is it played OK up until 6 months ago then quit after something changed, maybe an update. Please believe me that I have tried many if not all posts regarding the issue. Something is preventing the game from working. Uninstalled re installed the Microsoft patch is and had been installed. Video and sound drivers are up to date. Screen resolution up and down 256 color setting etc. Video Card is ATI 4850 and has been all along. Does the error code entry help you at all? Regards Peter

[curiousclive]

Think this says it all:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/com...I%20&os=32-bit

Seems only way is upgrade win7 to pro or ultimate and use XP mode.

Or possibly to dual boot XP if you have it.

[rob12317]

this may sound unrelated but check this out, i had a similar issue with an older game on windows 7...would play at first then one day just stopped, faulting app was the dplayerx.dll, so i do my research and fiddle with tcp/ip, downloading ipx emulaters, disabling my firewall etc.
What i noticed is that it would crash as soon as it tried to play sound...like..i would click the shortcut...screen goes black like its about to load...a logo starts to appear, a crackle sound is heard then boom...im looking at my beautiful nature desktop again.
so i go into my control panel, click the realtek sound manager icon and start lookin around in there...defualt setting was at 24bit 48000 hz studio quality...i changed it to 16bit 44100 hz at cd quality and presto, what i think happend is i let windows update my onboard sound drivers and it defaulted to this incompatible format (for old games anyways)why it gave the dplayerx.dll as the problem i'll probably never know, oh wait, yes i do...windows.
odd? yes...is it an issue in your case...maybe not...but if you haven't tried it yet give it a go and see if it works for ya...i hope it does.

[CLiNT]

If you haven't done this already it might be woth trying:
unregister "dplayerx.DLL", delete it and copy a new one in and re-register it.

Registering and unregistering .DLL files

[petrox]

Hi CLiNT and Rob12317, I have tried to unregister the dplayerx.dll but the command regsvr32 -u dplayerx.dll rejects the command line because of the U. Regarding going to Win7 pro and XP mode Windows says that the XP mode in Win 7 will run older office programs. It does not mention games. Regards Peter