Copy Protection System Drivers Anno 1701 Free

I have just spent way too much of the last three days trying to install the 1701 A.D. Gold Edition (or ANNO 1701, if you prefer,) on my new Windows 8 laptop. I had similar problems installing it on 7, but all that took was a couple patches.

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More on that later. The first step I took was to install it. (Duh.) After it completed, I couldn't do anything with it. So I tried running it as an administrator; in compatibility mode for XP, XP with Service Pack 2, XP SP3, Windows Vista, Vista with Service Pack 1, Vista SP 2, and Windows 7; and as administrator in compatibility mode for all listed above. Still nothing. I sent Ubisoft an inquiry, but never heard back. After some browsing, I found on Aspyr's (the original ANNO franchise owner) website and installed it.

Next start-up I received a popup about a bad driver: Error 1275. Not success, but at least its progress. I opened up the disc files to see if they held any useful information. That's when I found this.

Just found a way to get it to run. Copying and pasting from the source. Trying to get Anno 1701 to run on Windows 7 took me months to find a solution online, but I got it working today. I have both Anno 1701 and The Sunken Dragon expansion on separate disks (so not the gold edition), as well as Windows 7 64bit. The main culprit that is stopping the game from working is the old Tages copy protection on the CDs which isn't compatible with Windows 7 (especially the 64 bit version).

What you need to do is this. 1) Uninstall Anno 1701 completely from your computer. 2) Go to and download and install the most recent version of Tages (the install program acts as a toggle, so if Tages is installed it will uninstall it, and if it's not installed it will install it. If it says it is installed it would be better to use the program to uninstall and then reinstall it again. 3) Install Anno 1701 by finding the setup.exe program on the CD and right clicking and selecting 'run as administrator' - because you installed Tages in the last step you shouldn't receive the popup reporting 'unsigned drivers' as it sees you have newer drivers installed and so doesn't use the incompatible ones from the CD.

4) Install patches 1.01, 1.02 At this point my computer was still saying 'Anno 1701 has stopped working' when I tried to play it, the next step suddenly made everything playable. 5) I installed The Sunken Dragon expansion which upgraded the game to 1.04 (use the 'run as adminitrator' on the setup.exe as before). Suddenly both games now work. Some of the above steps may not be needed depending on what version of Windows you have and what edition of Anno 1701 you have, some users have mentioned just using the latest Tages drivers worked for them with Windows 32bit, but this is what worked for me. I hope this is of use to you as it is a great game.