I got a copy of the rare PC port of Battle Engine Aquila with my Radeon 9800XT card ages ago, it's the Asus OEM version, but should work fine on other graphics cards. It uses the Ghost Installer to install the game, but that fails on my Win8.1 with error messages about not enough disk space and my TMP/TEMP folder not being writable, so I decided to work out a manual install of the game! This should work for any other version of Windows too, that doesn't like the Ghost Installer on the CD-ROM.

Note: there was a commercial release of this game, but I don't know if that uses the Ghost Installer. If it does, then the guide below may well work for that version too.

You need to have 7-Zip File Manager installed before you start this. Also note that in the guide below I use the path "c:\games\beaquila", but you can change that to whatever path you prefer, the game should still work. It doesn't rely on the Registry at all.

1. Create c:\games\beaquila folder on your PC

2. Open your computer, then right-click the Battle Engine Aquila CD-ROM and open it (don't install)

3. Open the EXE folder on CD-ROM and copy both files in it (BEA.exe and cardid.txt) into c:\games\beaquila

4. Go back up one level on the CD-ROM and copy the Manuals folder into c:\games\beaquila

5. Copy All.gip to your Desktop (or elsewhere on the computer, but NOT into c:\games\beaquila)

6. Open 7-Zip File Manager, then find the All.gip file, don't open it, just select it

7. In 7-Zip File Manager, choose "Extract" and use the default setting. This will create an extracted "All" folder in the same location that you put All.gip in

8. All.gip will be extracted. You'll notice a lot of "sounds" files won't extract. This is because they have a special file in their folder that prevents extraction, so we need to add those separately. Click "Close" on the 7-Zip extraction window

9. Open the "All" folder you extracted on your computer, then open "data", then open the folder with a long name, then open the "0" folder, then open the "sounds" folder

10. Delete the 0 KB files called "english", "french", "german", "italian" and "spanish", as they're not needed

11. Make new folders called "english", "french", "german", "italian" and "spanish" in this "sounds" folder

12. Go back to 7-Zip File Manager (which should still be open) and double-click the All.gip file to open it

13. Open "data", then open the folder with a long name, then open the "0" folder, then open the "sounds" folder

14. Open "english" and copy the "MessageBox" folder in there into the new "english" folder in the extracted "sounds" folder

15. Go back up one level in 7-Zip File Manager and repeat this process with the folders for "french", "german", "italian" and "spanish" (i.e. copy the "MessageBox" folder inside the "french" folder into the new "french" folder in the extracted "sounds" folder).

16. We've finished with the All.gip file now, so close 7-Zip File Manager and then we can install from the extracted "All" folder, as follows:

17. In the extracted folder, go back up to the folder with a long name. It'll contain folders called 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

18. Open each folder 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and copy their files out into c:\games\beaquila (so after this point, c:\games\beaquila should contain "Manuals" folder, BEA.exe, bink32.dll, cardid.txt, Message.exe, ogg.dll, vorbis.dll and zlib.dll)

19. Rename the "0" folder to "data" and copy the whole folder into c:\games\beaquila

20. Open the c:\games\beaquila folder and run BEA.exe to play! You can right-click and drag a shortcut out from BEA.exe if you wish to have a shortcut to the game elsewhere

I hope this helps someone, somewhere out there!