Old CD games: Age of Empires

Posted Dec 10, 2025 10:24 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
Parent article: Bazzite: a gem for Linux gamers

> I tried installing a few Windows games from CD-ROM; each time the install seemed to work perfectly, but the games failed to launch.

Age of Empires is about the only reason I keep an old WinXP VirtualBox around - Wine apparently can't cope with the CD protection mechanism used by Win95. The game requires either the CD to be in the drive, or you are in a multi-player game where someone else has the CD. While VirtualBox can use a CD Image to fool the game, Wine couldn't last I tried.

Cheers,
Wol