Age of Empires

[Litude]

Great news! Thanks to ex-Ensemble Studios employee Matt Pritchard, the thought to be lost CGW exclusive demo got uploaded to an AOE2 fan site and is now available for download. Get it from here. As previously stated, the demo includes an exclusive 5 scenario campaign. It is limited to 640x480 resolution for whatever wicked reason, but the campaign file also works in the later demo if you copy it over (allowing you to play at 800x600).

[MrFlibble]

Great news! Thanks to ex-Ensemble Studios employee Matt Pritchard, the thought to be lost CGW exclusive demo got uploaded to an AOE2 fan site and is now available for download. Get it from here.

This. Is. COOL!

[MrFlibble]

BTW, are there any extra music files in the demo? The Age of Empires MIDI music package at Game Music Base has an extra tune called "conquest.mid" that I haven't seen in any version of the game.

[Litude]

That conquest.mid seems to be a conversion/recreation of the fourth RedBook audio track on the original Age of Empires CD. It doesn't seem to be an official MIDI file judging by the comments that have been appended to the file.

[MrFlibble]

Ahh, I suspected that but didn't look closely into the file.

[leilei]

mirsoft often has duds, you'll find non-quake songs in the Quake package there for example

[MrFlibble]

mirsoft often has duds, you'll find non-quake songs in the Quake package there for example

Hmm, the soundtrack packs I've got from them so far were rather accurate, so it's actually for the first time for me.

[MrFlibble]

It is interesting that the regular trial version does not reject the CGW demo campaign, making it playable in a higher resolution (an presumably with less bugs) if the full version is unavailable (the demo campaign can be downloaded as a separate file here). Since one of the exiting splash screens in both CGW demo and the Trial version depict an Egyptian city, it would be reasonable to suppose that the demo campaign was initially intended to be Egyptian, but then it was changed to Hittites, probably for the reasons of variety (since the tutorial campaign in the full game is also Egyptian).

[MrFlibble]

Here's a well preserved preview of the game (Wayback Machine copy):
http://web.archive.org/web/199901170254 ... ticle.html

Screenshots are clickable, I'm sure some of them are available elsewhere though. There's also a dev team photo and some renders as well.

[Lunick]

Sweet, you are always on top of these things

[Litude]

There used to be a bunch of previews (including that one) available on AoEBeta here, but sadly all the links are broken now as I mirrored these on a web space I no longer have. Can't say whether they will be fixed in the future though. But most of them should be available through the wayback machine if you simply visit the website a preview is listed under.

[MrFlibble]

I've looked up archived copies of previews that the old Microsoft page linked to (that's how I found the one I posted above), but most of them did not preserve the screenshots for some reason or other.

[MrFlibble]

I've just noticed that a CD in Hallfiry's collection has a different size of the AoE demo. While the version here is dated October 3, 1997 and is 24,785,176 bytes in size, that demo is 24,779,776 bytes, and the date stamp is October 6, 1997. The same version, also dated October 6, is available here and here.

I've just checked Microsoft FTP, and the version there is also different, with 24,786,864 bytes in size, and the date stamp from October 9, 1997.

I wonder what all the differences are about

[DOSGuy]

A few days doesn't seem like enough to change very much. I was never able to find a version number anywhere in the AoE demo. If one exists, it would be interesting to see if it changed. Does anyone know how to find it?

[Hallfiry]

I've just noticed that a CD in Hallfiry's collection has a different size of the AoE demo. While the version here is dated October 3, 1997 and is 24,785,176 bytes in size, that demo is 24,779,776 bytes, and the date stamp is October 6, 1997. The same version, also dated October 6, is available here and here.

I've just checked Microsoft FTP, and the version there is also different, with 24,786,864 bytes in size, and the date stamp from October 9, 1997.

The 24,779,776 demo actually has an October 3 timestamp on Gambler(PL), PC Fun(FR) and Generation 4(FR).
All other occurances (CD Action(PL), PC World Komputer(PL), PC Action(GER), PC Games(GER), GameStar(DE), CD Mania(PL) and PC Player(GER)) have altered timestamps.

You should probably also post the links to the catalog (the duplicate search is quite useful for that):
24,779,776 1997-10-03
24,786,864 1997-10-22
Expansion Demo:
21,738,576 1998-10-17