When attempting to play Age of Empires 2 (Gold Edition) the following message appears: ‘Could not initialise graphics system. Make sure that the video card and driver are compatible with DirectDraw’. I have tried all the suggestions in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article which addresses this issue: support.microsoft.com/kb/242902. In addition, I have also reinstalled the updated ATI driver, installed (and reinstalled) the latest version of DirectX, tweaked the hardware acceleration settings, reinstalled the game, booted into Windows VGA mode, and run the game in various compatibility modes. However, none of these procedures has resolved the issue. As a sidenote, other games, such as Sport of Kings and Medieval Total War, work perfectly! The software vendor’s advice and computer manufacturer’s advice was to download the latest graphics card drivers, which I tried without success. The computer is a Toshiba Satellite M70 notebook running Windows XP Professional (SP2) with 512MB RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon X700 graphics card. Any advice you could provide to get the game working would be most appreciated.

You certainly have tried all the usual procedures to resolve this issue. When researching this error message, I found much the same suggestions as you have already discovered, such as reinstalling various components including the video drivers and DirectX, and also tweaking various settings. One additional Microsoft Knowledge Base article I found (support.microsoft.com/kb/179920) suggests the problem can be caused by the game shortcut. While this article is relevant to Age of Empires version 1, the procedure outlined may still be useful to help resolve your issue.

Unfortunately, apart from what you have already tried there is little else I can suggest, or have been able to find through researching the problem. The only generic suggestion I can provide is running the Windows System File Checker in case any Windows files have become corrupt (however, this suggestion is very much clutching at straws’¦). To run the SFC, go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ’sfc /scannow’ (without the quotes) and click OK. The SFC utility will commence scanning the Windows files. Once the SFC has finished operations, it will exit silently with no user feedback.

Should any other readers have suggestions for Keir, please write in!