I miss Emperor! Buts I can'ts plays!

[darkfall13]

I was rummaging through all my crap and came across this game in a box of stuff and I remembered how awesome it was. Then I remembered how it sucked when XP was updated and I could no longer play it, so I never actually played through the whole thing. So I installed the game on my new computer and put the 1.09 patch on and the 1.10 patch (which I guess I didn't need since it's mostly disk reading issue related) and tried starting the game. I saw the EA and Westwood intro movies and then a long pause of nothing so I ctrl+alt+delete the game and put EMPEROR.EXE and GAME.EXE into Windows 98 compatibility mode and try again. Same thing occurs and I try again. This time it runs, though the intro movies are really choppy I ignore that and start the tutorial, it runs amazingly smooth. I play through it and close the game for dinner. Now I can't get it to run again. I've tried 5 times and all I get are the EA and Westwood movies and then the game freezes. Does anyone know how to get this game to run reliably on XP SP2?

[darkfall13]

And I did follow the sticky "How to get Emperor running on Windows XP" thread and that did not help.

[darkfall13]

Hey there, for anyone else that may come across this problem I e-mailed EA and they suggested I lower my sound's hardware acceleration to "Basic" under the Sound tab in dxdiag (accessed from the run command) and now it works flawlessly.