This guide will show you how to install Emperor: Battle for Dune on modern operating systems.
Installation
- Insert the Emperor: Battle for Dune installation disc (disc 1) to the CD/DVD drive.
- Exit the autorun and run setup.exe from the disc as administrator. (not applicable to Windows XP)
- Install the game as you normally would.
- Patch the game to version 1.09, the latest official patch. (mirror)
- Download the official Emperor Installation Fix. Extract its contents to the main game directory, and overwrite Emperor.exe. This is the official way of removing the SafeDisc copy protection from the game, but the discs are still to play.
- Browse to the game’s directory and set Emperor.exe and Game.exe to always run as administrator. (not applicable to Windows XP)
- Run the game.
Running data from the hard drive
Once the above procedure is completed, the game will still load soundtrack and cutscene files from the discs. To play the game with loading everything from the hard drive (but still requiring the disc, alas), do the following:
- Browse to the game’s installation directory, and create three subfolders in it – they can be named arbitrarily, but for the purposes of this guide, name them CD2, CD3, and CD4.
- Insert CD 2 (Atreides) and copy its content (setup folder not necessary) to the CD2 folder in the game directory.
- Repeat step 2 with CD 3 (Harkonnen) and CD 4 (Ordos).
- In the game’s main directory, open the file resource.cfg with a text editor.
- Find the lines that appear like so (D: may be replaced by whatever letter the optical disc drive is assigned to):
CD2
D:\CD3
D:\CD4
D:\ - Replace these lines with:
CD2
.\CD2\CD3
.\CD3\CD4
.\CD4\ - Save the file and run the game.
Multiplayer
For online multiplayer, please refer to the XWIS service.
LAN will not work by default on modern systems.