Rebellion Refreshed & Reloaded (x86/x64) files for download

[addict-ant]

Hi All,

 

After a couple of weeks away and many emails requesting these files, I've put them on a filedropper download (many thanks to the person who suggested it - my apologies I've forgotten your name already):

 

http://www.filedropper.com/rebrefreshpackagebeta12withvcl30addedbyant

 

as you may note I've found and added the file vcl30.dpl to the rebed folders (finally figured out what that was - makes rebed work on 64 systems...I think )

 

If for any reason the download isn't working, email me at addict-ant@outlook.com and I'll see what I can do.

 

P.S. I've just got a windows 7 professional 64 system and whilst rebellion runs, the colours are all messed up (almost looks like it's running in 256 colour but not quite). I've tried all the compatibility settings and checking up to date graphics drivers etc but to no avail - if anyone has any suggestions I'd be eternally grateful.

 

 

 

 

EDIT 11/08/2013: BEEN HAVING PROBLEMS WITH FILEDROPPER.COM SO HAVE SET UP THIS AT OUTLOOK'S SKYDIVE:

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=B9BB0ECEEDB43135!108&authkey=!AATeErb0o3a47FM

 

AGAIN, ANY PROBLEMS PLEASE EMAIL ME AS ABOVE

Edited August 19, 2013 by addict-ant

[addict-ant]

Scratch what I said - I got it working finally with win7 64...the hurdle all along was my AMD graphics card, of all things disabling it sorted out the colours straight away!

 

Though if anyone else has colour/display issues, this was a great resource (provided by Kristaps - who also clued me into filedropper - many, many thanks, sorry I forgot your name dude):

 

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-gaming/age-of-empires-2-on-windows-7-has-color-issues/a1763d12-11e2-498f-9b23-122792b14f74

Edited August 19, 2013 by addict-ant

[budious]

Thanks for keeping my work alive. It's been too long for me to even remember enough to be helpful here.

[addict-ant]

You are the same budious! (REF post: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=28312&p=550416#p550416)

Sorry, if I'd thought to look a little deeper, I could have found that out without asking the question.

 

It's an absolute pleasure - I'm eternally grateful for the files in the first place - to think I can continue to have this game to play for at least another 5 years makes me unreasonably happy

and it's all due to those files. Huge thanks to you and any who helped create them!

 

And if I can help others get it working then I figure I'll have that many more people to play against multiplayer

[budious]

Yeah, since the time I made those files though, the free virtual machine applications available have become quite advanced. For the simplicity, and additional benefits, I'd just recommend setting up a XP SP3 32-bit guest OS in VirtualBox these days. You get the flexibility of scaling the interface and multi-tasking as well.

 

http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/4869/swrebellion.png

[Master_Xan]

Like budious said, I would suggest using a virtual machine. That way, you can keep playing Rebellion even after we go to 128 bit systems- assuming we don't completely redesign computers into brain implants or something.

 

The color issue is common with games from this era. Age of Empires 1 and 2, Starcraft, Warcraft 1 and 2, etc etc. As they suggest in the link you provided, killing explorer will fix it. But doing so is annoying, and not all games recover from alt+tab. Here is a better method.

 

Create a bat file. Do this by right-clicking, going to New->Text Document. Name it whatever you want. Open the file with Notepad, and paste the following into it:

 

@echo off

ECHO Using process.exe to suspend explorer.exe (win7, vista palette fix)

"C:\Games\AoE2 2\Process.exe" -s explorer.exe

ECHO Starting Age of Empires II - The Conquerers in the correct screen mode

"C:\Games\AoE2 2\age2_x1\age2_x1.exe" 1600

ECHO Resuming explorer (was suspended before)

"C:\Games\AoE2 2\Process.exe" -r explorer.exe

 

Once you paste that in, edit the locations to match your system. In this case, instead of AoE2, you would be using Rebellion. The first line of the file will disable echo statements (notations); each statement that begins with ECHO gives you information about what the program is doing. First, this file will stop explorer. Then the file will load the game (in this case, Age of Empires 2). Finally, it will automatically resume explorer. This means that you click on this one file and it does everything for you. No alt+tabbing out of the game, no manually restarting explorer, etc.

 

The file process.exe is a little command line utility. It is freeware, and available here. If you don't want to use any 3rd party programs, you can replace those lines with 'taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe' to stop explorer, and 'start explorer.exe' to start it again. This will require a little testing on your part to get it right, since I haven't done it.

 

If you use process.exe, make sure you change the location in your text file to where ever you put it- I put it in the same folder as the game, just to make things simple. One last step. The file is a text file, or .txt. You need to make it a batch file, or .bat. To do so, go to a folder- any folder will do, including Computer, My Documents, etc. Press the alt key and go to Tools -> Folder Options. Click on the View tab, and find where it says, "Hide extensions for known file types". Make sure that is unchecked. Save your settings and go back to your text file. Rename it (select the file and press F2, or right-click and chose rename). Remove the .txt and replace it with .bat. Example:

Start Rebellion.txt -> Start Rebellion.bat

 

Double click the file and see if it works! You can right click on a .bat file and chose Edit if something goes wrong; maybe you misspelled something, or you want to copy the file and use it for another old game.

 

(For anyone interested, there is a community patch for Age of Empires 2 that makes it widescreen and removes the need to do all this for that game. But no such patch exists for Starcraft, or Cavewars, or other games with the issue, so the above method is still quite valuable.)

[budious]

This is a mirror for the file in the OP since a guy in another thread says he's having problems downloading from there.

 

:http://www.filehostfree.com/skin/stylish/thumb/thumb_zip.png

[addict-ant]

@ budious - thanks for the download mirror: I hadn't seen that when I edited my post above.

Also you make a good case for the VM - I'm gonna have to try one (last time I did I couldn't get it to connect the internet but sounds like things have got better since and that was at least a few years ago that I tried)

 

@master xan - cheers for the post above, you've very well encapsulated the main suggestion on the link I posted. The other (for anyone having display issues on old games) was to simply leave the change resolution window open when starting an older game (sounds crazy I know but enough people have said it works to try it). Also anyone like me who has an AMD graphics card might want to try disabling it worked for me!

[Master_Xan]

Leaving the resolution window open changes how graphics are displayed. Can't remember why, but I think it is similar to what happens when you right-click on something as a program opens. In that case, the open dialog box forces the program to use DirectX9; I think because Windows uses DX9 for the desktop. Can be quite handy, since DX10 and 11 aren't always stable. (It is the only way I can play Red Faction: Guerrilla.)

 

Many old games allow software rendering, so disabling your graphics card forces the game to do it that way, thus solving some problems between old games and newer drivers/cards. Newer games don't typically allow pure software rendering, as they require the extra resources a graphics card provides.

[addict-ant]

Ahhh...so that's why leaving the resolution window open works for some games. Cheers Master Xan.

 

I've now successfully tried a VM (VirtualBox running XP sp2) to play Rebellion on and feel I can give a beginner's appraisal of the pros and cons for Virtual box as opposed to the Refreshed+Reloaded files.

 

Pros:

You know the game will install itself, patch easily and run on windows XP and previous versions, so minimal, if any, tinkering required.

You can dynamically change the size of the window the VM is in (I find playing in 'windowed mode' without a VM is way too small and standard full screen stupidly large - especially on my widescreen monitor )

You can multi-task without the game auto pausing (good for multiplayer)

Multiplayer games seem more stable/less prone to crashing

 

Cons:

You need an old version of windows to install on the VM

You need GB's of disk space to accommodate the guest OS (it wanted 10GB for my XP)

First time set up of a VM takes quite some time to install windows & some tinkering (there are a plethora of settings for the VM but I only needed to adjust 2: in 'Storage' add 'Host drive E' & in 'Network' select attached to: 'Bridged Adapter' -Big Up to Budious for that one! Cheers )

If intending mutliplayer internet access is required which can be a pain (I've been unable to update XP+internet explorer and wasn't able to install microsoft security essentials so am a bit concerned my VM is wide open to attack and how that might relate to my pc - any advice here would be much appreciated. I should note that once I got gameranger installed I haven't had any internet issues with actually playing the game - just browsing the internet)

 

All in all I found using the refreshed & reloaded files quicker but slightly more involved technically. I do bemoan the loss of 10GB but... am I going to get rid of it?...

No chance - I much prefer playing it on the VM but will keep both versions so as to be able to play more people multiplayer

 

To get the game to run on my wiin7 pro 64 system I followed the following steps:

Create new game folder: C/Program Files(x86)/LucasArts/Star Wars Rebellion.

Copy the entire contents of the game CD to that folder.

From the Refreshed & Reloaded files:

copy in the d3drm file;

replace the REBEXE.exe file with the one in the rebellion folder;

use the Rebellion x64 registry file (right click merge).

Disable graphics card and restart pc - Game Ready! The Rebed in the files works fine so long as you have the vcl30 file (which is in the download)

Battle graphics are slightly jerky around fighter movements but nothing I can't live with

[Master_Xan]

Once you figure out how to create VMs, it is pretty easy. That first one can be a bit rough though.

 

VMs are actually extremely safe. So long as you don't access anything sensitive (if you do update Internet Explorer, do NOT do any banking!), it is actually far safer than using your normal OS for everything. The VM OS has no idea it is running in a VM, making it impossible for viruses and hackers to break through from the VM to the host OS. I say impossible- I'm sure there is some way to do it, but so far as I know, nobody has figured out how. And if you get a virus on the VM, just delete it and create a new one.

 

If you look at how much free space is on the VM's "hard drive," you can see how much it actually needs. Often they ask for 10 GBs or more, but after installing the OS you may find that 5 GBs are free. That means that if you ever create a new one with the same OS (in your case, XP), you could probably do 8 GBs just fine. Remember the OS needs some free space to swap data files around, and you need enough space for whatever you will install on it. But you should be able to add more space to an existing VM. Most of the time, it is as simple as dragging a slider to the right a little.

[budious]

You can use the snapshot feature to capture the state of the VM after installation and personalization, then if you bork the registry or pick up viruses, all you need to do is restore the snapshot and it goes back to the saved state. Quicker than reinstalling a VM.

 

The one advange to pre-allocating the entire Virtual Disk is that the file created will be continous across your hard disk and minimally affected by defragmentation. Using the dynamic disc allocation (grow on demand) will result in the expanded virtual disk being written to the next available clusters so defragmentation becomes more of an issue. Hard drives are cheap these days, if you can spare 10GB up front for pre-allocated Virtual Disk, the performance will be better.

[Master_Xan]

If I'm strapped for space, I don't tend to do snapshots. But Budious is right, those are faster and easier than re-creating the VM from scratch.

 

I've never had a defrag problem. Are you referring to the defrag process taking longer? Or problems with the VM after the host harddrive is defragged?

[budious]

Think about it as a two-layer fragmentation issue. The virtual OS has to seek the virtual hard disk for the file it wants to access, in turn, the host OS has to navigate the virtual hard disk (file) as a noncontiguous data structure which may be interleaved with other data on the physical hard disk. By creating the .vhd all at once then the disk space on the physical hard drive is contiguous, but allowing it to expand on demand may put parts of the .vhd at the inside, middle, outside of the physical hard disk and not particularily in the order of access. The virtual OS has to seek the virtual hard disk (it doesn't see .vhd, but virtual C:\) to find rebexe.exe which may be contiguous internally to the .vhd, but the physical distribution of the .vhd on the host physical hard drive may be noncontigous (sample layout; .vhd[cluster 0-99]/mp3's/.vhd[cluster 200-299]/avi's/.vhd[cluster 100-199]). Seek time and latency increases, but on modern disk and outside of heavy i/o processes, then performance impact may be neglible for an application of this type.

 

Also, there were brain fart issues with my previous usage of defragmentation and fragmentation interchangeably. Sorry.

[Master_Xan]

This may be a stupid question, but what's wrong with defragging the real hard drive? Shouldn't that put the vhd into contiguous HD sectors, thus eliminating the problem?

 

You may have to use something better than Windows default defrag tool- it isn't very good.

[budious]

I don't suppose it is much of a problem if you do defrag, I was just noting that it would create a fragmented virtual hard disk.

[Stratus]

Looks like your download links that everyone has posted no longer work. Please attach the files directly to this post or even better, go to our Downloads page and upload the file there. All files can now be hosted by us directly. 

Thanks for your hard work and for keeping the community alive.

[Mordith]

Please!!! ❤️ Been trying to find this mod and figure if it can work for Steam install...

[rightarM]

@Mordith you need res hacker 3.4 available at github here. click on the green "Code" and download zip. the original link url currently hosts only latest version which is 20 years newer :p

[Stratus]

On 8/21/2013 at 7:02 AM, budious said:

My old Rebellion site (very web 1.0) - Bud's Korner and Rebellion Strategy

@budious Wow your tripod website is still up! I remember tripod days! Surprised they still are hosting those files!! And don't worry, I have my own web 1.0 website archives of attempts of making a website