C & C Red Alert 2 Online

@alvararo1

Not sure who the "you" is you're addressing here; this forum is mostly ran by volunteers like me, and volunteers are the only ones who have investigated problems and patched C&C games for the last, um, full decade.

Also, nothing has been "cut". All C&C games up to RA2 use the (absolutely ancient) IPX system for their LAN multiplayer, which hasn't existed in windows since Windows XP. There are, however, fan patches to switch the whole shebang to the more modern UDP protocol, which works fine. For RA2, though, the game also does serial checking on the network, and unfortunately the Origin version doesn't seem to write the game's original game registry (including that serial), meaning a serial fetch by the game turns up empty, and all people on the network will be found to have that "same" empty serial. This can be circumvented by changing the registry and adding that serial key into it.

On to online multiplayer. As far as I know, standard multiplayer should connect you to XWIS, the community servers which took over after Westwood Online shut down. Though, they require you to register a valid RA2 serial for the games you want to play, for anti-piracy reasons, meaning you can't actually play on XWIS without an account on their website in which to configure said serial. You can find your game serial by hovering over a game and clicking the [ i ] button on the small info popup that appears.

There is an alternative to XWIS, though, which doesn't require registration. CnCNet originally started from a LAN-play-over-internet experiment for C&C1, and has never done any serials checking or even account creation. The community from which CnCNet grew is very active, and known for producing the fan-patches which gave high resolution and loads of other fixes to C&C1 and RA1, and they actively patch the games against cheating. For RA2, currently, they only have support for the expanded game, Yuri's Revenge, because it is far more popular to play online with the addon units included, though vanilla RA2 support is in development too.