This is the first time I’ve tried installing Age of Empires II: Age of Kings on a windows 7 PC. And it won’t work.
I install it, I boot it up. The intro movies work. But when it gets to the game menu, it’s all grey and splotchy and looks like a TV with no signal. Cursor is there and sound works! Any attempt to run it in “Troubleshooting mode” under Windows XP settings gives me error messages about DirectDraw something or other.
Has anyone gotten this time honored classic to work on a Windows 7 machine? You’d think “Microsoft O/S…Microsoft GAME…” easy peasy, right? but no. No such logic to be found on my laptop. 
It’s a known problem.
It works with Vista in much the same way, the colors are all out of whack. Note that this is what happens when you try to run an old-tech game on a new-tech computer. The thing that should actually surprise you is that it works at all. I find that more impressive than the fact that it has a few flaws.
Thanks. I found the articles, but this talks about problems with colors rendering improperly. Mine is just a grey wash. 100% unreadable.
Anyhoo, I will tweak the color settings some more, see if I can at least get to orange sheep on purple grass!
Probing it further, I installed AOEII on my mom’s new Windows 7 PC, where it works FINE, minus the discoloration I could live with.
However, it’s completely messed up looking on my laptop. This has led me to conclude that it must be a conflict with the video card. Can I turn down acceleration in Windows 7? See if that does the trick?