Widescreen Gaming Forum

Crashes at load. It installs, it pops up the 'Loading Game' windows screen, and promptly falls over. :evil:

I've tried the latest patch (1.08 I think) and the various compatibility modes... no joy. I really want to play this again; I think it's one of the more enjoyable RTS's of it's time. (Not to mention I really like Dune ;) )

I've narrowed it down to a Win XP issue because on my Win 98 box, it runs fine... but I don't particularly want to go looking for 98 drivers for my laptop or my main rig... it'll be a pain.

Anyone with any ideas?

Thanks in advance, people. :D

OK, well, in a (somewhat justified, for once ;) ) fit of enthusiasm, I went looking on Westwoods' FTP server to see if they had any more updates. And lo and behold: they did! Interesting that it never appeared there before...

Anyway, there is a fix available in the public FTP archive:

ftp://ftp.westwood.com/pub/emperor/update/

it's named "EmpEngInstFix10.ZIP"... follow the instructions in the zip, and everything's happy. It'll even take the 1.09 update without screwing up. Which is a nice surprise. :D

Anyhow... following on from that, I tried to get it working in widescreen. It's promising, because of a couple of registry entries, but when I put any widescreen resolutions in, it chopped off the top and bottom of the screen. :evil:

I'm wondering if it's driver or card specific, though. Although it's useless for me either way, until I get a widescreen display on my desktop. ;)

If anyone is interested, this is the Reg Key you're looking for:



Then the options 'ScreenHeight' and 'ScreenWidth'.

Excuse me while I go play this again. :) Even if it isn't in widescreen...