Thank you for the dosbox-x suggestion. I am running Ubuntu on a newer laptop and did not have any luck getting Age of Empires to work in a virtual machine because of issues with DirectX on modern hardware. The game would render so slowly as to be unplayable.
I installed dosbox-x out of curiosity, then saw you could load Windows 9x on top of it. I chose the recommended Win98SE. It took a bit of tweaking to get the drivers loaded for 256 color display and the sound card, but I was just able to play the game. Because DosBox emulates the machine (I think this is it, anyway.), there are no issues with DirectX rendering. I was able to play through the Ascent of Egypt learning campaign for the first time since 2009 or so.
Maybe next I'll try to loading up a version of BASIC. I'd have to rewind back to 2000 or so for using Visual Basic in high school computer lab.
Thanks again, getting to play AoE without having to buy an XP-era laptop, was a real treat.
Nice! I think my favorite part of the original age of empires was the weird Latin sounding simlish of the voices (Pleribus!)
It'll be interesting if you can get the original VB to run. Fun fact there was actually a visual basic for dos which would let you build TUIs out of extended ASCII.
I saw that and was quite pleased with the idea of it all working nicely in say,80x50 text mode, that I proceeded to write a similar set of subroutines.
I ended up with a pretty nice subset.
Could draw a window with fields, pop a number of them up on top of that window, if desired.
Used that to write a small pile of DOS programs which computed various manufacturing related values used in sheet metal work.
I installed dosbox-x out of curiosity, then saw you could load Windows 9x on top of it. I chose the recommended Win98SE. It took a bit of tweaking to get the drivers loaded for 256 color display and the sound card, but I was just able to play the game. Because DosBox emulates the machine (I think this is it, anyway.), there are no issues with DirectX rendering. I was able to play through the Ascent of Egypt learning campaign for the first time since 2009 or so.
Maybe next I'll try to loading up a version of BASIC. I'd have to rewind back to 2000 or so for using Visual Basic in high school computer lab.
Thanks again, getting to play AoE without having to buy an XP-era laptop, was a real treat.