Graphics problem while playing AoE on winxp through vmware

I set up vmware and used my copy of winxp on it. Then i installed Age of Empires II: The conquerers on it. It's a 10 year old game that is extremely lightweight. When i begin the game everything works well but the text on the lower right corner of the screen(attached pic) is scrambled. No other text in the game is affected.

I tried changing the game resolution but it didn't work. When i put the game in 1280x1024, the shadows started to look funny, it looked like some texture was tiled all over with identifiable boundaries unlike the seamless boundaries you usually see for shadows. In 1024x768 and 800x600 there aren't any other problems other than the scrambled text.

Could someone help me out with resolving this problem?

 

try using real windows and overclocking


GPU core/mem is downclocked horribly on a mac

 

Real Windows and overclocking? lol... thats hilarious.

anyways...
This game actually works fine with Wine... you can try to do it all yourself, or this link below might be a bit more help. Then you *should* be able to play without even needing Windows. The wrapper you can get there is already ready to go, and Paul always makes videos to help out, so it shouldn't be too hard.
Age Of Empires 2 for Mac

 

Thanks a lot

Update: Using with wine makes it unable to play multiplayer through gamespy. Thus this is not an option for me.

 

You can also try to up your VRAM amount in VMWARE. Personally I use VirtualBox which is completely free and works pretty well.

 

Have you tried giving Parallels a try? I find it much better for games than VMWare. It deals well with graphics far better and runs better than VMWare in this regard.

 

I tend to like Parallels more as well, but as I said... VirtualBox is free