Red alert 2 units dying

This is most likely some ingenious DRM kicking in. I can't imagine why however. Does Yuri's Revenge work?

yuris revenge works fine but not the original, i really have no information to give other than i downloaded it via origin

same idk why ea fix your game

@andy50009

Yeah, the old Westwood DRM acts really weird on the Origin versions. I advise you to make sure you're running the game in WinXP SP3 compatibility mode, and as administrator, but beyond that, no clue.

I had heard of someone who had to reinstall it three times, and the third time it suddenly just worked 😕

I had this too, so I followed what was written here:

https://help.ea.com/en/article/how-to-run-older-command-conquer-titles-on-windows-8/

Namely:

1. Launch the Origin client on your computer, and go to My Games
2. Right-click the game, and select Game Properties
3. In the text field, type -Win
4. Check the box beside Disable Origin in Game for this game
5. Click OK

No problems after that, although the game is very slow and laggy, despite being so old and running on a fairly powerful PC.

I wish EA had done some modifications to the game when they rereleased it, instead of just copy-pasting it as is.

@S1Drano

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S1Drano wrote:

although the game is very slow and laggy, despite being so old and running on a fairly powerful PC.

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This is actually an incorrect mindset; the combination of modern CPUs being multi-core, and a lot of graphical stuff being outsourced to the graphics card, might actually mean the game itself gets less resources, since it was made in times before all that, and thus simply can't use more than one CPU core, and never touches the GPU. On top of that, there's a tendency of players nowadays to play the game in higher resolutions, but these games don't scale, so higher resolution means more visible terrain, and thus more visible objects at the same time. The game's engine was never designed to handle so many objects shown at once, which causes additional problems all by itself.

I'm quite aware about how multicore CPUs affect apps that weren't built for them.

The PC I'm using has a 3.5 GHz clock rate and can turbo boost to up to 4.2 GHz. I remember playing this game on a 400MHz Celeron. I'm quite certain my CPU would have no problem with Red Alert 2 of all games, especially since an i7 should be way faster per Hertz than a Celeron that was released alongside the Pentium 3. Also, I'm fairly confident Windows is capable of moving any other process to the remaining 7 (logical) threads should the game require more resources.

Also, this particular game does not support resolutions above 1024x768. Even though I'm playing on a 4k screen, the game won't render at a higher resolution. The graphics are blurry from the scaling. Besides, the game runs constantly slow, regardless of how many objects are visible at the same time.

No, my PC is definitely more than fast enough for the game. If anything, I'd expect the game to be running so fast it becomes unplayable, but not the other way around.

I suspect it's simply some incompatibility with the OS. The game is most likely trying to make some calls that Windows 10 either doesn't recognize or simply no longer supports, which throws tons of exceptions around that the game needs to catch. That would explain why it's running so slowly.

But I can't really tell for certain without seeing the code, and frankly, I'm not really interested in looking at old code. I've got more than enough of old code to look at, at work.

I just went into the game folder.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games\Command and Conquer Red Alert II

and started the game with the RA2Launcher.exe

Now my units no longer die in 30 seconds

@Nutzy_Squirrel That's exactly what the Origin browser starts, though.