How do I get an older Windows 95/98 game to run in Windows 7 64-bit without some colors looking off?

If it is anything like the color issues that Age of Kings has with Win 7 64 bit, you could try going to the Task Manager and ending the explorer.exe task, and then going back into the game.

With Age of Kings, you could start the game, ALT-TAB back to Windows, open the task manager and end process on explorer.exe you will lose all the Windows toolbars and things when you do it, but you can then ALT-TAB back into the game and the colors should be fixed. (In Age of Kings the graphics errors made the water bright purple.)

If you leave the task manager up, once you are done with the game you can just go to run and type explorer.exe to get Windows back up again.


DirectDrawFix

You only need to run this once per game's .EXE file. No more need to manually close or use software that will close Explorer.exe every time you run a game.

Windows Vista and Windows 7 break color compatibility with certain applications that depend upon palette-based, 256-color graphics. Due to changes to DirectX and DirectDraw, the colors of these applications and games may appear distorted under these newer operating systems.

DirectDrawFix will allow you to resolve this specific issue by applying required compatibility fixes to the registry. Elevation is required for this application to perform its updates.