Age of Empires switches

You can run Microsoft's Age of Empires using a series of command-line switches. The switches eliminate some sound and video problems and also let you adjust how the game runs.

To add a switch, follow the procedure detailed in the item on Age of Empires in this month's Bug Patrol. In Step 4, instead of using the msync switch, use any of the following:

NoStartup to skip all the pre-game cinematic sequences.

640 to set the screen resolution to 640 by 480.

800 to set the screen resolution to 800 by 600.

1024 to set the screen resolution to 1024 by 768. (You can use only one of the 640, 800 and 1024 switches at any one time.)

Mfill to fix the horizontal line problem that occurs with some Matrox video adaptors.

NormalMouse to replace the custom mouse pointer with a standard pointer.

NoSound to turn off all sounds except those played in cinematics.

NoTerrainSound to turn off all terrain sounds.

NoMusic to turn off all music.

Msync to fix lock ups when using the SoundBlaster AWE64 card.

MidiMusic to play MIDI music instead of Redbook Audio music.

Don't worry about the capitalisation -- it's irrelevant. You can add multiple switches to the command line by separating them with a space.