Windows 7: Graphics issue with Age of Empires II: The Conquerors

Although I do not have AoE, I have a similar issue for Master of Orion II, I tried your fix and it worked, although there are a couple more tweaks to do. Its very encouraging. You can check the thead for Master of Orion II here:

Master of Orion II - Anyone got it to work correctly?

If you have anymore imput that would be great

You can try applying a no-cd patch. That would fix the whole problem of searching for the right disc. I recommend you GameCopyWorld, but I see that they redirected to this site and this site. Here is a direct link to the latest one on MegaGames -

I have my game cracked like most of my games because this saves my CDs actually being used. I never thought about this before but this could be a factor in my theory of the "explorer.exe" process working. Maybe when you disable "explorer.exe" CDs cant be read? This is jsut speculation though as I have not tested this myself.

Mm, that sounds a bit logical.. I'm gona test this now. I'll post the results soon.

If killing explorer.exe works for you, this should make it hassle free. Copy and paste the following into notepad (not including the code start/end headings), and save as "play.cmd" (no quotes)


--Code start--

taskkill /F /IM Explorer.exe
empires2.exe
Start explorer.exe

--Code end--

This SHOULD fix it.

I believe I've seen this before on page 2...
But you're right, it should work!

Guys i tried all the above stated fixex..bt nothing worked for my pc. However, you can try o close the explorer while playing the game(open task manager->go to services rab->close/stop explorer.exe).

It worked for me and my friends

Wait, that isn't logical! You say you have tried all those solutions above but they don't work. But killing explorer.exe will fix it? That's crazy because there are two solutions above that do exactly the same!!!
Anyway, thanks for your help.

Hi everyone. I was having this problem, but I managed to get it all working with Windows 7 64bit.

This is what I did:-

Right-click on the icon on desktop, select ‘properties’ go to the ‘compatibility’ tab, click on ‘change setting for all users’.

Set compatibility mode to Windows 98/Windows ME, tick the boxes for ‘Disable visual Themes’, ‘Disable desktop composition’ and Disable display scaling on high DPI settings’.

Tick ‘Run this program as administrator’.

Select ‘Apply’ and then ‘OK’

This works for me. The only problem I have is that when I ALT+TAB back to desktop and then back into the game, all the colours get screwed up again.

The other way of getting AOE2TC to run with Windows 7 64bit is to run a program called ‘Suspender’. Using this program allows me to play the game OK, but you can’t ALT+TAB any more.

Finally, after trying all suggestions here, I have found one that works.

Change the desktop to Windows classic. Thats it. Runs no probs now.