Age Of Empires II The Conquerors - High Resolution+Music Fix On Windows 7 64bit

I just got a huge itch to play the Age of Empires series again. I played Age of Mythology last week and worked without a hitch on Windows 7. But when trying to install my all time favorite Age of Empires 2 yesterday, ran into a lot of problems - after hours of googling, I have managed to get the game up and running without the dreaded colour bug and that too at my monitor's resolution of 1680x1050 (vanilla AoE 2 and AoE 2x are limited to 1280x1024) and I managed to get the game to play background music again (more on this below).

So I am compiling a guide so that anyone who wants to install this classic can spare themselves the agony of spending hours to find a solution. The following guide has been compiled using my Age of Empires Collector's edition which I bought some 9 years ago. I can't guarantee this guide will work 100% for other editions/compilations of the game - but I see no reason why it won't work
A. Installing Age of Empires II - The Age of Kings When I tried to install AoE 2, it would keep getting stuck at 50% when copying the file ARIALNB.TTF - so I had to use the following steps to get it to work

1. Insert your Age of Empires II disc. DO NOT run the setup through autoplay. Close autoplay, go to My Computer, right click the AoE 2 CD and Open it.

2. Now right click AOESETUP.EXE and click properties and go to the Compatibility tab

3. In compatibility mode, Select Run this program in compatibility mode for: and in the Drop down menu, select Windows 98 / Windows ME

In Settings, select the following options:

Disable visual themes
Disable desktop composition

In Privilege level, select Run this program as administrator Click apply and then click OK

4. Now, run AOESETUP.EXE as administrator and the setup should complete without a hitch B. Installing Age of Empires II - The Conquerors Expansion

The conquerors setup went smoothly for me - did not need to set it to compatibility mode. If you run into problems, I suggest you use the above method. C. Updating the game and Installing the resolution patch

note: the resolution patch will only work for The Conquerors Expansion and not for the vanilla Age of Kings

1. You can get the 1.0c patch from Microsoft Games. Install it.

2. Now get the resolution patch made by boekabart of [URL] - download the AoE2WideSetup.msi installer

3. Get a No-CD exe for the conquerors expansion -the widescreen patch only works for No-CD exe, spent around an hour trying to get the widescreen patch to work only to find in the readme that it wont work with the original executable because its encrypted or something

4. The readme for the widescreen patch says that it only works when it's installed to the game folder of Age of Empires 2 so when installing the patch, keep that in mind. My installation path for the patch was: J:GamesMicrosoft GamesAge of Empires IIAoE2Wide

5. After installing the patch, you should get a shortcut on your desktop named AoE2Wide. Run it. After it finishes running you should get a .bat file on your desktop named "AoC1.0c 1680x1050.bat" or something.

6. Right click on the .bat file and go to the compatibility tab and select Run this program in compatibility mode for: and in the Drop down menu, select Windows XP (Service Pack 2) and click OK.

7. Now run the .bat file as administrator and keep your fingers crossed!! In game menu, make sure to select 1280x1024 as resolution. If all goes well, the game should be running at your desktop/monitor resolution and the colours bug should vanish. Enjoy!
D. About the Music Bug and Fixing it

This has plagued AoE 2 for a long time now. The Age of Kings and The Conquerors CDs are mixed mode CDs i.e. one part holds the game data and the other part holds the game's BGM in Red Book Audio CD format. Now, old computers (1999-2000's) had no problems with this as they had an audio connector for the CD drive (more info here) and AoE would play the audio track off the CD once you start the game. But since now we use SATA drives, the game wont play BGM anymore.

This always puzzled me as when I got the game I had a Win 98 Pentium 2 PC with a Philips CD drive which had an audio connector and the BGM would play correctly- but when I got my Pentium 4 machine with a Samsung DVD drive with no audio connector, AoE 2 would not play music anymore and it takes a lot out of the game as the music plays a big part in setting the mood of the game.I used to get around this by starting a game in AoE, alt+tab back to windows and then playing the Game CD in Windows Media Player and then alt+tab back into the game.When using the above widescreen patch, my system hangs for a bit when alt tabbing back to windows (I guess it's because the patch suspends explorer.exe in order to prevent the colour bug). So after more searching on google and experimenting, I found another method here developed by TheMegaX2 and FrozenWolf150 Quote:

1. Use Windows Media Player to rip the soundtracks from the game CD's. I did this with both the AOK and AOC soundtracks. WMP will usually create .wma files.

2. Rename them to something recognizable, like AOK Track.wma, since the default name for both is 01 Track 1.wma.

3. Use a free audio converter, to convert them to .mp3 format.

4. Copy them to the Taunt folder.

5. Assign them numbers like you would for custom taunt files. I named them 50 AOK Track.mp3, and 51 AOC Track.mp3.

6. When you start the game, now you can choose between the AOK and AOC soundtracks, based which you prefer. Just press enter and type 50 for Age of kings BGM, and 51 for The Conquerors BGM and press enter again.