Emperor Reborn

Emperor Reborn is a free, open-source launcher to play Emperor: Battle for Dune (Westwood, 2001) on modern Windows, tested on Windows 11 and expected to work on Windows 10, with real 16:9 widescreen, fullscreen scaling and working multiplayer.

I wanted to play Emperor again and ran into the usual problems with a 25-year-old game on modern Windows: the installer fights the OS, and even once it runs the game sits in a small box in the middle of the monitor. Multiplayer has been dead since Westwood Online shut down.

Tom Mason (wheybags) already wrote a patch that handles the hard part: installing and launching cleanly without the original disc check. This is a fork of his work with the few extra things I wanted, wrapped in a launcher so you do not have to edit the registry by hand.

What this adds on top of wheybags' patch

• True widescreen (16:9). The headline feature. Every other way of running Emperor wide either stretches it fat or crops the top and bottom off. This widens the actual view instead: the battlefield renders at the real aspect with no stretching, and the harder half (sidebar, cursor, edge scroll and menus) lines up correctly too. The in-mission sidebar/HUD layout builds on Moro's widescreen patch, shared freely in the Emperor community on Discord and used with thanks; the 3D camera scaling and the front-end menu and star-map fixes are this project's. As far as I can tell it is the first real widescreen for this game in the 25 years since release where the whole interface works.
• Fullscreen scaling. Your chosen resolution fills the whole monitor instead of pillarboxing. On a 4K screen the original resolutions are unusably tiny otherwise.
• Upscale for big, readable UI at 4K. On a 4K monitor the sharp modes make the HUD and text tiny. The "Upscale ... big UI" entries keep the desktop at its native resolution and render at a lower 16:9 size (2560x1440, 1920x1080 or 1280x720), then stretch that frame to fill the screen. Same big interface as a low resolution, without the monitor switching display modes.
• Cutscene movies kept at 4:3. The FMV cutscenes are 4:3, so widescreen stretched them fat. They now play at their original aspect with black bars by default; a launcher tickbox turns the bars off and stretches them wide if you prefer.
• Resolution dropdown. 16:9 widescreen (1280x720, 1600x900, 1920x1080, 2560x1440) or the original 4:3 modes (640x480 up to 1152x864), or match-desktop. Defaults to 1280x720. Saved between runs.
• Hostname / DDNS in multiplayer. Connect to something.duckdns.org instead of a raw IP, which is handy when the host's home IP keeps changing.
• No VC++ Redistributable needed. The C runtime is linked statically, so there is nothing extra to install. You still run two files, EmperorReborn.exe and EmperorHooks.dll, plus your own EM109EN.EXE on first setup.
• Builds its own clean copy of the game from your discs. It does not touch any existing install.

It is still the original 2001 game with all its original content. The one real change is optional widescreen; leave it on a 4:3 resolution and it runs exactly like it always did. Preservation, not a remaster.

Install

You provide your own copy of the game (English version) and EA's official v1.09 patch, EM109EN.EXE. That patch is copyrighted by EA and is not included here; it was a free download and is easy to find by searching the filename. Get it from a source you trust. No game data is distributed in this repo.

1. Put EmperorReborn.exe, EmperorHooks.dll, and your own EM109EN.EXE in the same folder.
2. Run EmperorReborn.exe. First launch asks for each disc in turn (Disc 1 install, then Atreides, Harkonnen, Ordos) and builds a clean copy of the game. It does not need an existing install.
3. Pick your resolution and Fullscreen in the launcher, then Play.

First-run setup happens once. There is a plain-English walkthrough in INSTALL.txt.

Resolution

The launcher saves your pick. Lower resolutions give bigger, more readable text; higher ones are sharper with smaller UI. The three "Upscale ... big UI" modes work differently, they keep your desktop at its native resolution (so the monitor does not switch display modes), render the game at a lower 16:9 size, then stretch that frame to fill the screen. That gives the big readable interface of a low resolution on a high-resolution desktop. Pick the tier at or below your monitor, a 4K render on a 4K screen would not upscale.

Resolution	Notes
1280 x 720	Widescreen, default, readable text
1600 x 900	Widescreen, sharper
1920 x 1080	Widescreen, sharp, smaller UI
2560 x 1440	Widescreen, sharpest
640 x 480 to 1152 x 864	Original 4:3 modes
Desktop (match screen)	Native sharpness, but the UI gets small on 4K
Upscale 4K, big UI	Renders at 2560x1440 and stretches to fill the screen, big UI
Upscale 2K, big UI	Renders at 1920x1080 and stretches, bigger UI
Upscale 1K, big UI	Renders at 1280x720 and stretches, biggest UI

On a 4K monitor the "Upscale ... big UI" modes are the comfortable pick, they give big readable UI without resizing the desktop. Otherwise skip "Desktop" and use 1280x720 widescreen (or 1920x1080 if you want it sharper) with Fullscreen ticked. If the image still sits centered in a small box, your GPU is set to "no scaling", switch it to Full-screen in the NVIDIA Control Panel (Adjust desktop size and position), or the AMD/Intel equivalent.

Verify your download

Every release is checksummed so you can confirm a download is the real one and not a tampered copy with something slipped in. The official SHA256 hashes are published on the site and in the release notes. Check the zip in PowerShell with

Get-FileHash .\EmperorReborn-v2.5.zip -Algorithm SHA256

and compare it to the published hash. The zip also carries a SHA256SUMS.txt listing the hashes of the two executables, so you can verify those after extracting. If a copy you got from anywhere does not match, do not run it.

Multiplayer

Westwood Online is gone, so this uses direct IP.

• Host: pick Host game / singleplayer, forward port 4005 (UDP and TCP) on the router.
• Others: pick Connect to server, enter the host's IP, hostname, or DDNS name. Use Test connection only after the host has clicked Play.
• In game: Multiplayer, username + 8-character password, Login, Custom. Host clicks Host; others Refresh if they don't see it. Pick Deathmatch or Co-op Campaign, everyone Accept, host clicks Play.

Only the parts needed for this flow are wired up, so stick to these steps. The connect box takes a hostname or DDNS name (DuckDNS, No-IP, Cloudflare) as well as a raw IP, which keeps the address stable when a home IP changes. DDNS does not open the port for you, you still forward 4005.

Building

Needs Visual Studio 2022 with the Desktop development with C++ workload. If it complains about the toolset, right-click the solution and Retarget. EM109EN.EXE is not needed to build and is never embedded; the launcher reads it at runtime from the folder next to the exe.

Build Release / x86, or from a Developer PowerShell:

msbuild EmperorLauncher.sln /t:Build /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=x86

Output is Release/EmperorReborn.exe and Release/EmperorHooks.dll. Both are needed and sit in the same folder. The exe links the C runtime statically, so no VC++ Redist on the player's side.

To package a redistributable zip (no copyrighted EA content):

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\package.ps1 -Version 2.0

wheybags wrote a good blog post on the technical details of the original patch.

If something's off

• Already have a working install (wheybags' version, or an old one)? You can drop EmperorReborn.exe and EmperorHooks.dll straight into that folder and run. If the game files are already compatible it skips the disc step and goes to the launcher. People have reported this working over an existing install with no reinstall.
• Windows Security or antivirus flags it. An unsigned exe trips SmartScreen, and a launcher that injects a DLL into the game can trip antivirus heuristics too even though it is clean. First check the download against the published SHA256 above so you know it is the real build, then click More info then Run anyway. Only add the install folder as a Windows Security exclusion as a last resort, if it keeps getting quarantined. Source is on GitHub if you would rather build it yourself.
• Image sits in a black box in fullscreen. That is the GPU upscaler set to "no scaling". Fix it in the GPU control panel:
  • NVIDIA: Adjust desktop size and position, Scaling: Full-screen.
  • AMD, including handhelds like the ROG/Xbox Ally: turn off GPU scaling and set scaling mode to preserve aspect ratio.
  • On a 1080p screen, 1024x768 fullscreen looks good.

Credits and license

• Original project: EmperorLauncher by Tom Mason (wheybags), MIT-0.
• This fork keeps MIT-0 (see license.txt). Third-party components are listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt.
• In-game HUD / sidebar widescreen patch by Moro, shared freely in the Emperor community on Discord and used with thanks (see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt).
• Maintained by azmawee (GitHub).

MIT-0 covers only the source in this repo. It grants no rights to Emperor: Battle for Dune, its data, or the EA patch, which stay with their owners. This is an unofficial fan-made tool, not affiliated with or endorsed by Electronic Arts or Westwood Studios. You need to own the game to use it.