Command and Conquer

@miguccio2

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@miguccio2 wrote:

but considering how old these games are, they shouldnt be a problem to run.

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That's an oddly common misconception. People think PC specs are the only thing that matter, but for older games, compatibility problems are the real issue, not machine specs; in simple terms of processing power, any modern smartphone is probably ridiculously overspecced for the older (pre-Generals) generation of C&C games.

But these games were designed for operating systems that worked totally differently, had different graphics handling (with loose documentation and frequent abuse by developers of undocumented features/behaviour), and on top of that, user rights were a loose to nonexistent thing. And in these days, there seemed to be a culture of "it's broken, but it doesn't crash the game, so it doesn't need fixing", on issues that, on modern machines, do cause crashes, due to tighter memory management by the operating system. All of these are serious issues for running old games on new machines.

Luckily, people are still putting effort into fixing these issues. Command & Conquer 1, Red Alert 1 and Tiberian Sun have all been upgraded with community-created unofficial patches that fix a lot of their bugs and compatibility problems. For Red Alert 2 there's a more general patch that solves a lot of its graphics problems. You can find them here:

Command & Conquer 1:

• Nyerguds' C&C95 v1.06c revision 3 patch (which also adds bonus missions originally exclusive to the Playstation and Nintendo 64 versions of the game)

Red Alert 1:

• Funkyfr3sh's automatic Red Alert 1 patcher/installer
• Nyerguds' main.mix cleanup for TFD/TUC (Not really needed, but cleans up about a gigabyte of unnecessary files in the RA1 folder. Unpack in the game folder, run "patch_main.bat", let it finish, and then delete the files you extracted.)

Tiberian Sun:

• Funkyfr3sh's Tiberian Sun patch

Red Alert 2:

• The graphics system patch DDWrapper is known to solve the "black screen" issue.
  Download the zip file and extract "ddraw.dll" and "aqrit.cfg" into your game folder. Then, open the configuration file "aqrit.cfg" in Notepad, change the "ForceDirectDrawEmulation" option to 1, save the file, and the game should work.