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Age of Empires II under Virtual PC

This is a great game, but if you needed me to tell you that then I do not know where you have been.  Released in 1999 this game has been heralded as one of the greatest real-time strategy games of all times. AoEII has many of the elements common to most real time strategy games, you have to build armies and buildings to both defend yourself and achieve specific goals, while having to balance resources at all times.

The real innovation in Age of Empires was the concept of "ages".  As you progressed through each mission you could move your nation from the Dark Ages to the Feudal Age, then the Castle Age and finally the Imperial Age.  Moving to the next age requires a significant amount of resource.  But it means that you will have access to more advanced buildings and units (though these units will in turn cost more, so more resource management is needed).

Age of Empires II under Virtual PC   Age of Empires II under Virtual PC   Age of Empires II under Virtual PC   Age of Empires II under Virtual PC

Age of Empires II runs perfectly under Virtual PC - as it should, because this game is actually one of the few games that we formally test.  Age of Empires II gets tested under Virtual PC to ensure that we are correctly handling copy-protected CDs, like the one used by this game.

If you have never played this game - go out and get it know (you should be able to find it for ~$10) and have some fun.

Cheers,
Ben

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 06, 2006
    Whats the real point of testing it under VPC (atm at least) when it runs perfectly under Vista and XP?

  • Anonymous
    October 07, 2006

  1. Not installing copy protection drivers on the host.
  2. Not messing up your host with game files/registry entries.
  3. Ability to play the game in a Window.
  4. Ability to take the game everywhere without having to install it.
  5. Not having to worry about possibile incompatibility with host OS the game was never designed for.

  • Anonymous
    October 08, 2006
    DosFreak: 4 doesn't apply here because Virtual PC must be installed in order to use it.  Virtual Server might be another matter, but I don't imagine the screen refresh rate is good enough for gaming. QEMU is better suited for portability.

  • Anonymous
    October 08, 2006
    It's not like it's that hard to install VPC, and if you already have VPC installed on your other computer then it's not a big deal.

  • Anonymous
    October 09, 2006
    Speaking of copy-protected CDs - does VPC support Laselock? I have one game (Earth 2140), which uses this protection and I'm unable to install it under VPC (FreeDOS 1.0 with vide-cdd.sys CD-ROM driver, the one from FD is still "little" buggy). (sorry for off-topic)

  • Anonymous
    October 12, 2006
    Hmmm.. Perhaps I could do a VPC and Win2000 to play Discworld Noir, a game that did not work in XP and up due to Safedisc restriction.

  • Anonymous
    October 19, 2006
    Oh, if my iBook just were fast enough even for that. :D

  • Anonymous
    December 04, 2012
    I set up Virtual PC and WinXP mode just for this, but apparently something's wrong. s11.postimage.org/.../aoc.png Can you help me out?

  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2014
    @Mark I have the same problem. How do we fix this, guys?

  • Anonymous
    November 11, 2014
    I'm having issues setting this up on my hyper v machine running Windows 7. I get an error initializing Direct3d and haven't had any luck resolving this. Thoughts?

  • Anonymous
    September 22, 2016
    The comment has been removed