Fences - problem with full screen game (Age of Empire 2)

from Stardock Forums

Hello all,

I've just downloaded Fences and while I like it quite a bit  there is one annoying problem (aside from slowing down the startup process - you really could do something about that too).  When playing Age of Empires II with Fences enabled the picture I get is messed up. The menu is still fine, during the game, however, the screen is full of red and green dots (and pink ones). If I turn off Fences everything appears to be fine. Curiously enough when I try to take a screenshot of it and save it as an image file - it's all looking good.

What could be the problem? Thanks in advance!

4,454 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

Same here, the good news is I have a workaround.

Create a batch file in the game directory comtaining the following:

  taskkill /f /IM explorer.exe
  Empires2.exe
  start explorer.exe

Run the batch file and enjoy the fixed graphics. If you're on XP you may not have 'taskkill' (test first, before launching the script). If that's so you can download it here (not my site, may be useful): http://members.ziggo.nl/gigajosh/2005/05/taskkillexe.html

I've read that the problem occurs with many display management style applications, not just Fences, and may be related to the way that Vista / Win7 force the taskbar to the front all the time. That doesn't explain why the same thing occurs in XP, though. I've seen it with many older games, including educational games my children play.

With this fix you don't need any compatability modes setting for AoE2, and I've verified that the 'taskkill' approach works with XP Home and Win7 Home Premium.

I've posted this previously and received a response from Stardock support, but it's not percieved as a Fences bug so don't expect a fix. Technically that might be true, but it doesn't happen without Fences (on XP), does happen with, and I'd have thought a workaround could be achieved by those clever Stardock folks. Lets hope for the best.

Let me know if this works for you, or if you need more of a walkthrough around setting up batch files and suchlike.

 

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

Rilian43,

this works great! Thank you very much :) So all we had to do is stop the process "explorer.exe" while the game is running and then restart it... I also hope that the Stardock folks will fix this - it might not be their fault, but an avarage user simply won't care. Also, they could make this program a litle faster - it takes a few seconds for my computer to start Fences - either after booting Windows or after restarting explorer.exe (and I have a relatively fast computer: Core 2 Duo T8100 -2.1 Ghz, 3GB Ram, Geforce 8600).

Well anyway, thank you very much for your help!!

P.S.: I am using Xp Prof so I have taskill

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