Command & Conquer Ultimate Collection

I also have another question. If our hard disks crash how do we re-install the games we have paid for if they do not appear in our Library?

After searching several times (and clearing the cache) for a solution I found a Red Alert icon in the app, so I was successful in re-installing the game.

The game actually worked ok last night which implies that Windows and Red Alert are all ok and neither is at fault.

Then today I have tried again several times and still can't get it to work. I can start the game from the EA app but just get a blank screen. Task Manager shows ra95.dat is running but all I have is a blank screen. Unfortunately there is no diagnostics as to what is happening. Could do with an error log that EA could look at.  Oddly enough I would expect to see ra95.exe not ra95.dat in Task Manager.

Over 3 weeks now and still no success. Maybe 1 in 10 times after I reboot my PC I actually get Red Alert to work. The rest of the time I still hope to get Task Manager to start and cancel ra95.dat and get control of my PC back or have to hard reboot. If I am lucky once a week it will work.  Even after playing the game if I close it, I go back to the EA Games app and cannot get Red Alert to run again even though I have just come out of it. EA have provided no diagnostics, info or logs to show what is happening.

Same problem here: it seems the game starts, but then it hangs on the main screen without the menu.

I need to reboot my system in order to use again my PC.

Yes, it is 3 months now and I still have exactly the same problem. Maybe not many people play the original Red Alert game. The screen clears and it looks as if the game is going to work but the menu does not appear. I have to cancel ra95.dat in Task Manager. It is as if I can only play the game ONCE in a reboot. Even if I go back to the EA Games app I cannot go straight back in. Only by rebooting can I sometimes get back in. There have been two Windows cumulative updates since this started happening. I am not convinced that it is not a EA issue at their end. I have also had "An error on our end caused the launch to fail. Try again a little later.".

I suspect part of the problem is that we cannot play these games without the game contacting the EA servers, where amongst other things, they tally up the time we have played the game. When the game fails to start, the only way to get control of our PCs is to terminate the task in Task Manager or reboot, but that does not tell EA that we have stopped playing the game. After rebooting, I have tried to play the game and EA tells me I am already playing the game. How can I be when I have just rebooted? Four months this has gone on now and I still think it is a fault at the EA Games end.

The cold hard truth: I went through all the same things as you, and realized that the EA Desktop App's "Legacy Origin" implementation is broken, or unfinished I mean. So I actually reinstalled Origin using the full offline installer, and then reactivated every game in my library. I have had no problems since then.

Side Note: On EA Desktop, the bonus content is missing from the library, unlike in Origin. The EA App also doesn't ask which country / locale to store user data, and it's missing a lot of other features that Origin has. I ended up switching mine to Sweden and everything worked fine! On Origin it is built into the installer, but on the EA App it doesn't give you any warning about this. There are also programs called ActivationUI, Touchup, Cleanup, etc, which work differently on EA Desktop. IMHO, EA rushed the development of EA desktop. I talked to a lot of support staff already, and got to the bottom of it, though I had to use an open source tool that allowed me to run Origin without popups telling me to install the EA Desktop App, though I ACTUALLY have both installed. EA thinks that EA Desktop actually works with all legacy titles. I also had to enable a setting that doesn't appear on EA Desktop, that allows me to run titles that were not fully tested for compatibility. It doesn't transfer game license information correctly, and the support staff won't tell you this, but EVERYONE has the same problem. One person from EA Help tried to say that my account was banned, and another one asked me if I had a Playstation?!?! Crossplay is also disabled, so I think that was just an act of desperation from people who didn't have clear information on what was wrong. Some of the tiles do not show up correctly if you have more than one edition of a particular title, and it tries to say that I live in the UK ( doesn't make any sense. ) I'm sure this happens to a lot of people when you use App Recovery, so I ended up just switching everything back to what it was. It just doesn't fetch the account information and update the tiles accordingly. On Origin I had zero hassle, everything works, even the latest stuff. I think when Origin is discontinued, I will archive my installs, and then restore them if there is a problem.