Fancying a bit of Jolly Jack Tar action and not being overly impressed with what I've seen of the more recent alternatives (eg high-visibility smoketrails for cannonballs and little of the clouds of gunsmoke famous from that era), I managed to get AOS2 installed on Vista 64 (basically by applying XP Compatibility mode to all the .exe's I could find on the CD, including those tucked away in subfolders). Patched to 1.56. I'm taking some time to get used to the control system while enjoying the excellent music themes but one problem is that the sea surface textures are overlaid with transluscent blue horizontal bands out to the horizon, which tends to obscure the otherwise not-too-bad sea textures (not too bad comapred to Fighting Steel anyway, which I can't play at all having an Nvidia card 8800GT with recent drivers).

Turning down the sea texture graphics setting in-game from High to Low helped a bit but the bands are still there, just a bit less conspicuous. Having re-installed SH3 recently I get vague but similar blue bands under water (in external view, naturally).

It's not so bad that I'd spend a lot of time fiddling with different drivers and driver tweaks to get rid of it but if any shipmate out there knows of a quick fix, I'd be keen to hear of it.

Anyway if not, at least my experience confirms that AOS2 can be got under way in Vista 64, and I might be tempted to pick up 'AOS2 - Privateer's Bounty' anywhere I can, which despite the title seems to be a less-buggy update to this 'proper' Napoleonic naval sim and not a Black Pearl in sight.

Hey there, raising this thread from the great beyond on the off, off chance someone out there may know of a fix.

Have the same issue with as the OP with the sea 'banding', still playable but pretty annoying. Thanks!

Just throwing out some ideas. Is the Age of Sail II v1.56 Patch installed? I checked around a bit and a thread over at Pirates Ahoy someone suggested using a windows98/XP emulator because of another user's issues with running it on Windows 7.(I did not know there were OS emulators) Maybe it works better with older software than just running it in compatibility mode?

Have you tried fiddling around with the graphics settings using such as Nvidia Control Panel? Perhaps try experimenting with anti-aliasing modes and the pre-rendered frame settings.

The only other thing I found at Pirates Ahoy was another member asking what utility he need to unpack pak. files in the game as one appears to contain all of the textures and such for the game.

I might put out my copy of AOSII and mess with it.

Hey there, thanks for responding. Should have mentioned in my OP that I'm actually playing "age of sail 2 - privateer's bounty", not Age of Sail 2.

Figured since I was having the same banding issue if there was a fix for age of sail 2 it would work for Pirates Bounty.

I've done some fiddling with aa in the nvidia control panel but no luck so far; the affect doesn't seem as bad during the evening/sunrise type battles, appears to be worse during daylight. Tried lowering the gamma and that helps a bit, but to really get rid of the affect you have to go far and end up not seeing anything at all!


Pretty good game so far, the effect isn't so terrible that I'd go through the trouble of using an emulator for it but good to know.

Hopefully one day GOG will acquire a bunch of Akella's titles. That'd be great given the usual GOG treatment their other games get.

I haven't been able to persuade the 1.56AOS2 to even run under W7x64.

It's on the list of 'things to fiddle with in the future' but shelved for now.

I just picked up a cheap used copy of AOS2 and got it to install and run under win7 64 in case fiddling time comes around.

At first the installer froze at 99%, but after trying again and changing compatibility settings on the autorun exe (and I think I did as well as the demo32 exe) it installed okay. WinXP was the mode.