Age of Empires 2 Won't Launch on Windows 10 (Solution)
I bought the CDs for Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings and the expansion Age of Empires 2: Conqueror's Expansion many years ago. I installed them on the desktop PC my family had at the time, and the games installed and worked just fine. No issues.
Those games were a couple of my favorites. But life gets busy and I kind of forgot about them. Many years later, I remembered them again, and so installed them on the computer I had at the time. The games still installed and played problem-free.
This year, I again remembered I owned these games, and in order to play them again I would need to install them on my current computer. I figured since it went well in the past, it should go well this time. I also thought that as technology advances, computers just naturally get better, so if my very old computer from over 10 years ago could handle playing these games, surely my newish computer should do just fine.
I loaded up the discs and clicked "install" on the installation wizard that popped up. Both games installed smoothly. The icons appeared on my desktop and they showed up in my apps list when I clicked the Start button.
However, when I would click on the icons to play the games, it would seem like it was going to launch, but ultimately would not. The games failed to play. I did not know what the problem could be. I ran through all the basic stuff people try off the bat: I removed and reinserted the disc, I restarted my computer, I uninstalled and reinstalled the games. These things did not work.
So I googled something like "Age of Empires II won't launch on Windows 10" or "Why won't Age of Empires 2 play on new computer". There were not as many results as I would have guessed for a game that was so popular - but there were a few results with some suggestions. There was hope.
The first result I clicked on talked about running the game in compatibility mode. Basically, you can have your current version of Windows pretend to be a previous version of Windows (ex. 10 can act as if it were XP) while I runs the game. I followed that advice, choosing an older version of Windows (I believe I chose 97 or XP) for playing Age of Empires 2, but it did not work. I was still unable to play the game.
I found the solution which allowed me to play this game on my new computer. The advice that worked came from a couple of different forums where someone asked the exact question I had and people were kind enough to help out. The links to those forum threads are:
age of empires 2 wont play on windows 10
How to get Age of Empires II to work under Windows 10
If you read all of the responses (there aren't that many) in both of those threads, you will have a decent understanding of what needs to be done to get the game to work. The user BossDweeb had the best and most useful responses.
To summarize, apparently at the time the AoE 2 game was made, there was an anti-piracy measure called DRM in the disc which told the computer that you were using an official copy of the game and should therefore be allowed to play it. If the DRM stuff wasn't present, then the game wouldn't play.
At some point, Windows decided that DRM wasn't worth the effort, and stopped having its software check for DRM, and so the game, despite being an official, non-pirated copy, would not pass the DRM check, and the computer won't allow it to play. That is why it would install and work on my older computers, but not my newest one. I had a newer version of Windows.
The workaround for this issue is to install some software that would allow the game to be played without the disc being present. It's kind of like cracking or jailbreaking the game. And even before the DRM issue with newer versions of Windows, "NoCD" software was being used simply for the convenience of allowing people to play their games without finding and running the disc each time.
The NoCD software patch will automatically solve the DRM issue keeping the game from playing on my newer Windows computer.
I meant to write this help guide sooner after I did it for myself, but time got away from me and it was a few months ago that I did this. As such, I can't definitively link to the correct NoCD patch. I believe someone linked to one in the forum threads above, but the link went to an empty page.
I think one of the noCD patches on this MegaGames page worked for me. You just need to choose the file with "noCD" in the title, one that is for your language, and one that matches the version number of your game (ex. v1.0 or v2.0). If you install the patch for the wrong version of your game, it won't work.
BossDweeb explains how the patch works and the steps to go through to install it. You should read their description and follow it. But just as a brief overview, you download the patch as a zip file, remove the letter "d" from the end of the filename, extract the contents, move the .exe file into the folder on your computer where the game installed to originally, and I believe the noCD file will replace the original game file. So its basically as simple as dragging a file into a folder, and the problem is solved.
The patch linked to above was only for AoE 2, but not for the Conqueror's Expansion. So to find the one for the other disc, I just googled something like "Age of Empires 2 Conqueror's Expansion NoCD", and found something just like for the first one. It wasn't too hard to find once I knew what I was looking for. I had never heard of NoCD patches before this.
I saw somewhere along the way that there was an update available for the Conqueror's Expansion which fixed lots of bugs and included improvements. I think it was linked to in the forum threads, but I'll link to it here just to be sure. The update is not strictly necessary, and you can solve the DRM thing and get it playing without it, but why not install the update and resolve bugs. If you do decide to do any updating, the order is important. You need to do the updating first, then take note of the version number of the update so that you download and install the right NoCD patch. If you do it in the wrong order, it won't work.
That's it! It took me a lot of internet searching and reading and head scratching to get this one figured out, but I finally did it! Huge thanks to those who asked the question before me and to BossDweeb for showing me the way!
I felt so accomplished in just getting the game to play on my computer. And I had tons of fun playing these games again! I hope this article was helpful to you in getting AoE 2 to play on your computer.
Anything I missed here that would be helpful to others facing this situation? Let me know in the comments!
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