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!

Potato Harvest

So, we’ve started to harvest our early potatoes. The gardener thinks there will be around 600kg of potatoes in our little plot, would be nice! Should last all of Botton for around a month…. We’re hungry farmers!

Anyways, I decided they look very beautiful, ginger light brown as one of the villagers says.

Very nice!

High Farm Contractor…

It seems today that I’ve become something of a contractor…

Yesterday night my girlfriend brought our big Blue tractor back from the Farm Workshop, and hopefully it’s been repaired fully now.

So, this morning after morning milking I hooked up the tedder to our blue tractor and headed out into the field to turn again..

On the way I hit a huge bump and did this to the fuel gauge:

Oopsala…

Anyways, after I’d turned the field, Justin from Honey Bee Nest asked me if I could go over and turn his fields as well, so I went over and turned 4 of his 9 cut fields, Hans and he did the others.

I then went back to return my 2 fields after, then he asked me if I could come over again and do some rowing up with the hay bob, so I finished my fields and went over.

Aww, look at those beautiful rows

After that I went to see about getting our contractor pay, eg tea and cake… They didn’t have either, but flapjacks… Almost as good

Then I headed back to High Farm and put the frontloader on:

Busy day…

So, today was the day of bringing in. I started off at 5am with morning milking, nothing spectacular there.

First thing after that I went turning the hay:

At 12ish I got the Side Rake from Botton Farm and began rowing up the fields:

Beautiful rows there

These rows were then picked up by Forage Wagon:

Me with a full one:

In the end we were foraging right into the night, and tractor lights came in very handy:

In the end Hans turned up around 10:30 with his forage wagon and tractor, and we did the last couple of rows together, had a little race (which I so won!) and then I brought in the last row of hay for the night at 11:30PM, long, but good day!

Sad news

Well, they say when the farmer goes away, one animal will die… Sadly for us that turned out to be true, one of our little calfies didn’t make it.

This is him in better times:

He was our first bull calf this year, we’ve had 6 or 7 heifer calves so far… And we were thinking of keeping him to be the next bull.

Not sure why he died, he got weaker and weaker, then collapsed in his pen and lay there all day. Tom tried to revive him with warm milk, and I opted for a electrolyte and glucose pack, but neither brought him back to full health and he passed away while I was out mowing the next 2 fields (Small and Big Bank Fields, 0.8ha and 1ha respectively).

Poor little guy, he was a real cutie, when we milked his mother he would be in the milking parlour too and lick and nibble peoples ears, or noses depending on which he could get to….

Hay making–Mowing

So, on Saturday we started mowing. I started off on Swedish Fence Field (1.85 hectares) on Saturday (21st), and ran on in there until it got dark around 10:30. Then I tried to switch the lights on, and realised that the lights didnt work… So I trudged back to the farm and got the fuses out and my volt metre and went through the fuses, I replaced one and the lights came on briefly, but then I found out that the alternator (the bit that charges the battery) was dead, and the battery was completely flat, so my dear little tractor (actually a big tractor) was dead in the water. I started again on Sunday morning, and borrowed Botton Farms tractor to jump start mine, but it didn’t work, so in the end we rolled the tractor down the hill to the barn, and put it on charge.
I then borrowed the Falcon farm tractor, but realised that the mower wouldn’t go on, so I waited for a bit till the battery was charged on our tractor, and used that. We got that field mowed, but the mower kept breaking, and the blades kept popping out, which while the thing is running at full speed, the loose blade then smashes into the blade holder, so I kept having to file out a part of the holder because it got bent, then part of Gully Meadow Field (1.17ha), then the mower broke completely. So I went and borrowed Botton Farms mower, which was on our little blue tractor.

Botton Farm’s mower was amazing, so smooth and fast, I managed to cut the entire of Gully Meadow Field in the same amount of time it took me to repair our mower whenever it broke.
Ooh, and I saw a deer:

New House (Temporary)

So, my dear girlfriend and I have taken on a house in Botton Village now for a month. The house is called Gean, it's very much nice and lovely. We've got 2 Villagers there at the moment, and we're just taking it on temporarily as they're looking to close the house and rehouse the villagers. Anyways, it should be a good bit of fun to run the house, the paper work is already piling up, but I shall pioneer onwards!
-Skipper out!