Notice to YSPilots/YSFLIGHT

Notice to YSPilots/YSFLIGHT
Legacy Pack available under the YSFLIGHT category.
Any individual requests for a model must be made to my email address, see bottom of the page..
Enjoy!
Skippy

Saturday 1 September 2012

Age Of Empires 2 The Conquerors Colour Fix

Hello folks, it's your friendly neighbourhood farmer here...
Taking a break from farming this afternoon to get my head around a little problem I've been having.
Some of you might remember a little game called Age of Empires 2. 
I recently started playing it again, and noticed something off, the colours in the game were really freaking weird!
Actually this isn't what it looks like exactly, I merged a screenshot which for some reason only showed the weird colours over black, with one that worked with the correct colours to make an almost broken one
The sea is pink and purple and the grass is red and the trees just look weird!
I searched around a bit and found that many people have this problem, and apparently it's a problem with Windows 7 etc.
So, I've made a fix for it, it's a registry fix, apparently there is one coded into Windows to deal whatever causes the bug (This guy explained it pretty well) Since I didn't fancy running a tool that edits my registry, in case it's a virus or something, I basically made my own registry entry.

So, here is how I did it, first I ran Age of Empires 2 (When I refer to AOE2, I mean AOE2 Conquerors expansion by the way... I didn't try it with AOE2 normal). I then ALT-TAB out and fire up the registry editor (search for regedit in the run/searchy bar thing)
In here is the entry we're looking for, it's under:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectDraw\MostRecentApplication

Here you want 2 things, it's easiest to print screen and paste it into paint for this, you want the ID and the name, it'll look something like that, though my ID is different from this:

ID in DWORD (32 bit): 0Dfc5342

And the name is: age2_x1.exe

So then I made a new key here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectDraw\Compatibility\

I called mine aoe1_x1 just because that's the name of the game exe. Then in here you want a DWORD (32 Bit) Value (called ID) and paste in your ID, and a String Value called Name and stick in the exe name, so age2_x1.exe

You'll want to check your ID though, I made that one up.
But anyways, here is one I made:
If you want, create a blank .reg file and copy this into it, but change the xxxxxxxx next to Dword: into your ID you got from the first part


Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectDraw\Compatibility\aoe2_x1]
"Flags"=hex:00,08,00,00
"Name"="age2_x1.exe"
"ID"=dword:xxxxxxxx


Then run it (Merge) and it should update your registry accordingly. 
And this is what it looked like in the end! Lovely eh?
Tada! Looks beautiful!