I can't get Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings to start get past the initial splash screen. I'm using a 32bit wine prefix and Windows XP or Windows 2000 at least gets me to the splash screen, but I shouldn't need Windows 2000 and up as the game was designed to run under Windows 95, but Win95 or 98 just crash immediately. Actually on Windows 98, I can't even get the game to install. If I install with Win2000, then swap to Win95 or 98 I get the crash.
Here's a pastebin with the logs: https://pastedir.com/1L9C0ru406
Anybody got any ideas, or should I submit a bug report?
Age of Empires 2 won't start
Re: Age of Empires 2 won't start
Possibly copy protection being weird? Here with win2k set I get the splash screen then a dialog with some cd related error. Anything else seems to crash. There's old test results on appdb from like wine 2.0 and earlier, possibly changes since then broke something but that wouldn't be fun to track down even if it ever worked as is.
Re: Age of Empires 2 won't start
So, my other comment was dissaproved because I didn't think about a cracked EXE technically being pirated software, but yeah, it has to do with the copy protection. A cracked no-cd exe works just fine. The game does run fine under Win98, but not installing under Win98 is still a problem.
Re: Age of Empires 2 won't start
Looking at some bugs for safedisc protected games it may be expected that the installer and game only work with certain windows versions set. But it looks like they are supposed to work, so you could file a bug assuming you have a legit copy of the game anyway. I don't have time right now but I was going to try to check if older wine versions worked which would be good to know for a bug report.
Re: Age of Empires 2 won't start
Interesting, here's a copy protection page on Winehq, and it talks about safedisc 1.x which says that it works in wine. So, this would seem to be a regression. https://wiki.winehq.org/Copy_Protection
It even specifically mentions AoE2.
It even specifically mentions AoE2.
Re: Age of Empires 2 won't start
Yeah, iirc there was a real effort to get that working at one time. Like back when games came on CDs. 
I was able to get it running with 2.0.4 (with virtual desktop off). 3.0.5 (and later?) just dies with:
004e:err:seh:raise_exception Unhandled exception code c0000005 flags 0 addr 0x7b463d95
You could file a bug. I would but technically I don't have an original cd so I'm not sure if I should.
I was able to get it running with 2.0.4 (with virtual desktop off). 3.0.5 (and later?) just dies with:
004e:err:seh:raise_exception Unhandled exception code c0000005 flags 0 addr 0x7b463d95
You could file a bug. I would but technically I don't have an original cd so I'm not sure if I should.
Re: Age of Empires 2 won't start
How did you get 2.0.4 and 3.0.5? I tried building from git but I can't get them to build because of missing dependencies about freetype fonts or something. And the official downloads seems like it should have the binaries already compiled, but I can't seem to find them and it just wants to compile. If you have binaries of those versions, could you point me to where to get them, or send your versions to me?
Re: Age of Empires 2 won't start
dl.winehq.org has packages for Debian/Ubuntu that far back. I saw something about Arch in your log? I don't know if Arch archives old packages? And yeah I think freetype is going to cause issues since it's looking for an older version and I don't know how feasible or possible it is to install that somehow. Or in theory you could unpack the Debian packages and see if they run. A lot I don't know, huh. 
Re: Age of Empires 2 won't start
Can you point me to the exact debian packages that you used? There's a utility called archalien that converts debian packages into arch packages, but the packages that I tried don't go back to 2.0.4, and I can't seem to run them like I do wine nowadays.
Re: Age of Empires 2 won't start
Sure. Directory is here: https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debia ... ster/main/
(buster is the current stable release so should be safest, and is what I used anyway)
Specifically the packages I installed:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debia ... _amd64.deb
https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debia ... _amd64.deb
https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debia ... r_i386.deb
Though you really only need 32-bit so you could just do the last one plus the i386 base package:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debia ... r_i386.deb
(buster is the current stable release so should be safest, and is what I used anyway)
Specifically the packages I installed:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debia ... _amd64.deb
https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debia ... _amd64.deb
https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debia ... r_i386.deb
Though you really only need 32-bit so you could just do the last one plus the i386 base package:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debia ... r_i386.deb
Re: Age of Empires 2 won't start
Well I managed to get wine to compile and did a regression test. Maybe I'll just file the bug regardless.
Code: Select all
23ec3ce2a3edc046872709733940dc51e77e0e91 is the first bad commit
commit 23ec3ce2a3edc046872709733940dc51e77e0e91
Author: Alexandre Julliard <[email protected]>
Date: Mon Dec 4 13:13:05 2017 +0100
ntdll: Start process execution directly at the kernel32 process entry point.
Signed-off-by: Alexandre Julliard <[email protected]>
:040000 040000 e549aadd9128a60d71695f892a5d0f85321d52a9 daf1047d9de253300cd47047c9fdd78c213d2c0d M dllsRe: Age of Empires 2 won't start
Yeah, if you wouldn't mind filing the bug, I would appreciate it. I couldn't get those packages to convert. I was able to convert some Ubuntu packages, but it seems that they didn't fully install. Wineserver was missing as well as winecfg. How did you get it to build?
Re: Age of Empires 2 won't start
Other than the freetype issue I don't think I did anything out of the ordinary. Just getting a build environment setup for wine can be a bit of work if you've never done it before though; you'd need 32-bit -dev packages and compilers/etc.
It shouldn't be too hard to track down where Ubuntu has wineserver if you want to go that route.
For freetype, there was an issue where (as I understand it) a change was made to be standards compliant which happened to break the wine build. This was fixed in wine in 2.18 so you don't need to worry about it unless you want to build an older version for some reason and AOE should work on any 2.x wine version. Or I can track down the patches again if you want. More on that here: https://github.com/bobwya/bobwya/issues/17
It shouldn't be too hard to track down where Ubuntu has wineserver if you want to go that route.
For freetype, there was an issue where (as I understand it) a change was made to be standards compliant which happened to break the wine build. This was fixed in wine in 2.18 so you don't need to worry about it unless you want to build an older version for some reason and AOE should work on any 2.x wine version. Or I can track down the patches again if you want. More on that here: https://github.com/bobwya/bobwya/issues/17
Re: Age of Empires 2 won't start
Filed a bug: https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49697
You can follow that, no idea if it's an easy fix or a lot of effort for little payoff or somewhere in between.
You can follow that, no idea if it's an easy fix or a lot of effort for little payoff or somewhere in between.
Re: Age of Empires 2 won't start
Thanks for filing that. From my experience, probably not a super easy fix, but the payoff should be pretty good. If AoE2 safedisc is broke, then lots of stuff with safedisc is probably broke. Probably just didn't figure it out because nobody actually tries to use games from the original CD these days, lol. Except me, of course.
Re: Age of Empires 2 won't start
You are not the only companion, I have the Monkey Island, Dune, Command & Conquer around here and I am proud of it.SeanRamey wrote: ↑Fri Aug 14, 2020 11:03 am Thanks for filing that. From my experience, probably not a super easy fix, but the payoff should be pretty good. If AoE2 safedisc is broke, then lots of stuff with safedisc is probably broke. Probably just didn't figure it out because nobody actually tries to use games from the original CD these days, lol. Except me, of course.
