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Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
10 years ago

RA2/Yuri's Revenge "On the House" Serial Key Issue

I was in time to get the initial RA2/Yuri's Revenge download, and had my brother and friends download it on their Origin account as well. Figured we'd bring back the golden days of CNC LAN'ning. Got the LAN patch up and running,.. only to find out the Origin version of RA2 still uses serials, and apparently uses the same serial for every copy for every account. The game connects just fine over LAN, but it won't allow any Origin user to join the game of any other Origin user.

Now, I still have my old multi-CD copy lying around, so I actually got a legit spare serial, and wanted to input that in the registry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER>Software>EA Games>Serial/CD-Key, but there does not seem to be a registry entry for the serial. I subsequently checked HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>Software>%, and all other possible locations (the Origin version of RA2 seems to create quite a few registry folders), but to no avail. There isn't a serial anywhere to be found!

Has anyone else found a workaround using the Origin version of RA2 yet, or has had better luck finding the CD-Key registry entry?

1 Reply

  • Nyerguds's avatar
    Nyerguds
    Hero+
    10 years ago

    @Laionidas

    If you're on 64 bit Windows, did you consider the wow6432node translation node?

    The registry entries should be under

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Westwood\Red Alert 2

    but on 64 bit machines, the SOFTWARE key only contain the registry keys for 64 bit programs. The 32 bit ones can be found under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\wow6432node\, meaning the RA2 key should end up at

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\wow6432node\Westwood\Red Alert 2

    If it doesn't exist... create it. 

    The actual value in there should be called "Serial", and if it doesn't exist you can just make it as new string value.

    What's inside that value doesn't matter, as far as I know. I don't think the game itself actually contains any key validation; that was the CD installer's job. I'm fairly sure that as long as the value exists, and is filled in with a different value on all PCs, it should work for LAN.

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