My rig will not play Age Of Empires( AOE III)

[DM186]

From what I have read on AOE III and what it is doing to me is crazy. On my gaming rig, I go through the CD down loading of the game which is 3 disk. After I am done. I want to play the game.
The Game is Age of Empires III
So when I click on the game it looks like it is going to boot but it stops. And that is it. It does nothing else. Now I go to AOE III fourm's to serch out an answer to the problem.

After doing eveything I could do before going to the forums. Getting into the program and running test. I get this binkw 32.dll is missing. Now I am at the forums and looking for the fix.

I found a program that runs a test on the lines of AOE III and they all check out ok except two and they were "deformerdll.dll" "esinet.dll".

I come across someone else who has the same binkw 32.dll file missing. They were trying to say that it is a damaged disk or the dvd driver is going out.

As I continue to look around I find that they are saying it is a Win 7 problem. Then I find this link to this big long drawn out fix or work around because I have Win 7. Here is the link.
http://forum.agecommunity.com/forums/permalink/911761/911761/ShowThread.aspx#911761

Now I have 3 rigs that I use. So on my Dell inspiron 580, i3, OS Win 7 home p, 6gig of ram, MSI GT 430, and OEM 300w PSU. I down load AOE III to it just to see if it will boot up. And it did.

But I was having a issue with it playing. It would work for 20 to 30 seconds then it would freeze then the screen would go black for a few seconds and then it would play again and keep reapeating in this manner.

Does anybody on here have a clue as to why on my gaming rig it does nothing and on my business computer with the same OS will play?

I know why is does the freeze on my Dell. That is not the problem I am looking for just my gaming rig. The spec's to my rig are below in my sig. I don't want to go through that long work around.

I have had this game for over a year. I have lots of games that I play and I just got around to playing it. I have all the AOE games. And Thank you in advance. Sorry for it being so long.

 

[songorocosongo]

Sounds really weird. It cannot be a hardware problem because i used to play that game a lot on my mom's PC back when the game was new, and it was a crappy dell inspiron with intel integrated graphics. I will go to my parents house to take the game and install it in my gaming rig (which has Win 7) to see how it goes and then give you some feedback.

P.S. Might take a couple of days

 

[DM186]

Hey thanks for the at least looking at this problem. I was hoping for more info though.
I can't change the way my rig is but thanks anyway and yeah get back to me
when you check out your mon and dad's PC.

I am a Age of Empires fan and I want to play it and can't I am sure some of you know
how that feels. Maybe I should have not said to much. I have seen that if you write
to much stuff, people tend to skip after poping in and looking.

I was hoping someone out here knows what is up or knows an easy fix besides changing my rig around.
At least I hope someone knows. I could be wrong

 

[DM186]

I guess this game goes to the shelf. Bumer and oh well that comes well.

 

[mercer95]

what error message to get now when trying to start the game on your gaming pc?

if it’s a .dll error you can just download them and drop them in your install directory.

 

[mercer95]

just to note i am currently playing aoe3 on windows 7 and i didn't follow that long winded fix.

 

[DM186]

^^
Hey Thanks I will try that later and I will let you know if it worked. That fix is something else. I have played all the Age of Empirs games and love everyone of them. I love the Shogun 2.

I have all the Total war games also. So it kinda sucks when you spend $50 dollars on a game and it doesn't play. It came with the add on games as well. Again thanks for responding.

 

[DM186]

I will try one more time for help. Maybe I will get help or something close to help.

 

[mercer95]

have you tried reinstalling it?

 

[DM186]

have you tried reinstalling it?

^^
Oh yeah lets see I lost count after 10 times. I used the Revo uninstaller to get all the files that relate to AOE III. Revo is a deep cleaner of files that usally get left over when you use your normal add/remove programs in the control panel.

But hey evey bit helps and thanks for your suggestion.

 

[HEXiT]

some games have compatibility issues with there drm measures and the antivirus. games like fear combat evolved had this issue until they patched it out. until then all i could do is boot with no addons... go to start/ run/ and type MSCONFIG when the box opens select O Selective startup. uncheck everything except use original boot. apply and reboot. when windows starts try running the game as administrator...

now specifically the bink.dll problem... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911203

 

[DM186]

some games have compatibility issues with there drm measures and the antivirus. games like fear combat evolved had this issue until they patched it out. until then all i could do is boot with no addons... go to start/ run/ and type MSCONFIG when the box opens select O Selective startup. uncheck everything except use original boot. apply and reboot. when windows starts try running the game as administrator...

now specifically the bink.dll problem... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911203

Thankyou for responding. I knew you would be able to send me in the right direction. I will try this in the morning. I will let you know and everybody else if this is a fix or not. Again thankyou.

 

[HEXiT]

if the game works you can then alt-Tab out and start your antivirus and firewall if you have a 3rd party 1.
if original boot doesnt let the game work, try again with it unchecked also...
anything bink related http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm you can find players and all sorts of tools here to help with a bink install issue.
if you get the sdk you get the bink player which will allow you to watch things like game fmv's and cut scenes...

 

[DM186]

if the game works you can then alt-Tab out and start your antivirus and firewall if you have a 3rd party 1.
if original boot doesnt let the game work, try again with it unchecked also...
anything bink related http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm you can find players and all sorts of tools here to help with a bink install issue.
if you get the sdk you get the bink player which will allow you to watch things like game fmv's and cut scenes...

Again thankyou so much. I tried the first one and I did see more info that got downloaded then before. So I know I am on the right track. But some how I through a curve ball and had a major issue.

I spent all day trying to get back to windows because I followed microsoft directions and some where along the line I could not get windows to load. Everytime I let it boot it would act like it was loading safemode.

Then it got bad that right afer normal boot I would get the BSOD. No matter what I did to restore, fix, change, it got so bad that I couldn't boot to safe mode anymore. So I tried to do recovery. I have a 320 external HD.

On the that I had backed up with a system image on it. Change the boot in bios to boot from disk or repair disk that I made. And I could not get there no matter how hard I tried. Then I used a repair disk that I made.

It was from my dell and while on the phone talking to my ex I was clicking on things not really listening to her and trying to stay on top of what she was saying. Then all of a sudden my desktop loaded up.

I don't know how that happened but it did. Now in the morning I will try again but I will do things a little bit different. Don't think for one moment that you caused any of this. It was operater error and you have put me on the right track.

 

[HEXiT]

sounds like you have some hidden startup entries... some that start from the registry rather than the early boot/system startup folder... you will need a decent optomizer app like win 7 optimizer... check out startup and make sure that theres no startup entries set to run on either a group account or main..

msconfig is supposed to allow you a clean add on free boot. with no issues. so for you to have issues i would think theres an underlying problem with the pc...

 

[DM186]

sounds like you have some hidden startup entries... some that start from the registry rather than the early boot/system startup folder... you will need a decent optomizer app like win 7 optimizer... check out startup and make sure that theres no startup entries set to run on either a group account or main..

msconfig is supposed to allow you a clean add on free boot. with no issues. so for you to have issues i would think theres an underlying problem with the pc...

Yeah there is something wrong but I can't put my finger on it. It is funny, I can get game that are older than AOE III like Rise of Nations, World in conflic, Rome Total war, etc.

All those game load. But somewhere in the booting it is doing its own there. I kind a wonder if I have been hacked? But I am going to have to go back to basics and find the problem.

If I find the problem I will share it with all of you. Thanks guys for all the help. I am not going to close this thread as of yet or at least in the next couple of days. So if you guys here anything else please chime in.

 

[DM186]

I am going to try this. Since I have two hard drives. I am going to in stall XP on the second HD and then load the game on that HD and see if it will work.

 

[DM186]

Still no fix for this problem so I am going to close this thread. And If I find a good fix I will let you all know and thanks for all the help.

 

[DM186]

Best answer selected by DM186.

 

[HEXiT]

you shouldnt have given me the best answer then... if i didnt earn it then i didnt earn it... please dont do that again... better to give it to some1 with a lower rank as they also tried.

 

[HEXiT]

anyways i tried installing aoe 3 and i cant get it to work either. my nephew has 32bit win 7 and it works for him. we have exactly the same security setup...
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_other-gaming/age-of-empires-3-installed-successfully-on-windows/ad0c3714-bad3-4abb-8c5f-86b77894f00f gonna try this later

 

[DM186]

You had more of the right track for me to follow and from now on if I need your help then I won't choose you unless it is fixed. I apologize for that and I did not mean to upset you and please don't hate me for that.

I have only been on here for 6 months and I have seen you answer a lot of peoples problems in cluding some of the threads I was working in. I didn't give you the best because who you were.

I gave it because It was the closes thing to a fix and I needed to close it out. Again my apology. And again thankyou for your help.

 

[HEXiT]

you didnt upset me m8. as i hope i didnt upset you with what looks like a little ungrateful post... i just thought it a little unfair that you picked me to give the best answer as you problem wasnt fixed... in that situation i would either just leave it open or give it to a member who helped but has a lower score...
anyways its not really a big deal.
i really hope you manage to get it to work as i have given up on it...

 

[DM186]

I understand and thank you.

 

[Wilted_Brainz]

I have found many different games out there that where top notch to play, but because of them being some of the older Win98/XP ones, they have no compatibility. I normally fix the problem with enough research.

So in closing. @DM186 I had the exact same issue as you. At first, I thought it was due to the new 6870 2GB vid card I installed. I did have this game running before with Win7 x64 Home Premium Edition. I now have it running once again. Some times the answer is not the most in depth and complex that we could find. I made an account with this site to post this for others to research for the same problem.

Just patch the game using this link.

http://www.agecommunity.com/gameUpdates.aspx#english

I love the AoE series, and I have every one. I also love the Dungeon Keeper series as well. Too bad EA has no plans on giving us DK3, but the War for the Overworld game looks promising, if they ever get it going. Hope this works, and enjoy your game. Let me know if this worked plz?