I have installed Age of Empires 2 in my Windows Vista Home Premium edition, whenever I launch the game, I get the error message ""Could not initialize graphics system. Make sure that your video card and driver are compatible with DirectDraw" I have ATI Radeon HD 2600 graphics card, any help will be appreciated.

I have tried modifying the target with "nostartup" also as advised in the Microsoft site but still have the issue. I tried installed DirectX 9 also, eventhough by default I have DirectX 10 but no success.

Thanks in advance,
Ravi

me too facing the same problem..........
can anybody help........

Does the compatibility feature work? Try that first.

This is stupid, even for Microsoft, see if there is a patch released for compatibility for Windows Vista.

Just tested.

Works fine here. Even shows in game explorer.

Updated to 2.0a

Set game to:

Compatibility mode to Win XP/sp2
Disable Visual theme
Disable Desktop Composition
Run as administrator

I had the same problem, with the same graphics card. I found a solution on a spanish forum. Try to install new drivers for the video card from this site: http://www.driverheaven.net/modtool/

Hope this helps, it did for me! I didn't even have to use compatibility mode.