Screwed up colours on old PC games. Starcraft, Gangsters, Age of Empires etc

So some of us out there all have those old games from the days of windows 98 that we still enjoy playing every now and then for nostalgias sake.  However, because of the advancements in operating system compatibility it a real issue. It can really make break the desire to play the games - and that's if the game even runs on the machine!


Gangsters: Organized Crime is one of those games for me. I loved it back then and I still do now.

I'd played on my Vista laptop a while back and it worked fine then but now it was time to test it on the 64bit Windows7 machine. It installed but the colours were all fuxed up.


I found a solution! I read the same thing happened to Starcraft and so after a little google search I found a starcraft soloution which also works for Gangsters as well. Age of Empires II as well probably.



The solution ( Starcraft Windows 7 and Messed Up Colors [Resolved] by FiggyG ) said this:

This issue affects Vista as well, although a right-click on the shortcut and in the compatibility settings selecting disable desktop composition fixes it. Windows 7 has a much tougher time. I have tried all of the compatibility settings, and none of them worked. As it turns out, the taskbar being always on top uses up colors from the 256 color palette in Starcraft. Thus you end up with teal and other nasty discolorations. The fix is turning off Explorer for the duration of the game. I use a batch file for this purpose that turns explorer off, then back on when you exit the game. Credit goes to members from SevenForums.com for trying a fix for Worms that happens to work with SC as well Of course, edit this to your location of StarCraft:

Code:

taskkill /f /IM explorer.exe
C:\Games\Starcraft\Starcraft.exe
start explorer.exe

You can stop reading if you know how to make batch files. This is for everyone else:

Copy the text in the above code box, then open Notepad. Paste it, and modify the code to where your Starcraft executable is. Watch out for spaces (if you need a space use quotes, eg: C:\"Program Files"\Starcraft\Starcraft.exe or C:\"Program Files (x86)"\Starcraft\Starcraft.exe for those 64-bit users out there.) Go to save the file, under Save As Type, select All Files, then type in "Starcraft.bat" or well, anything as long as it has the .bat. Save it to your Desktop. Double-click on your newly created batch file and you should be golden. If you have a different fix, please share

Note: If "text documents" is selected, it will place a .txt after the .bat making it not executable. Eg, StarCraft.bat.txt is very bad.

So I made a batch file (.bat) for Gangsters and I'm happy to say it works. My code reads as follows:


taskkill /f /IM explorer.exe
C:\"Program Files (x86)"\"Hothouse Creations"\Gangsters\gangsters.exe
start explorer.exe




I just thought I'd post this up on a more "permanent" or stable place on the internet for others to find if they wish to play their old games like I did.
If anyone finds this helpful then feel free to post a comment. :)


Tags: Hothouse Creations Gangsters Organized Crime Game Compatibility Windows 7 Colour Solution Fix

I ran gangsters and the colours were screwed up.