Recommend an RTS?

[Tanooki]

Hey since I brought it up the other day I did more digging and hit a wall on this.

C&C Red Alert -- Despite being out there free, I'm surprised that I can not find a FULL install for this game other than the original ISOs which won't work on a modern machine. There are people who seem to be control freaks like they think they own it where they've stripped it down to like 11MB as an install, then hide the music and movies on their webspace to control the game which is garbage. Has any of you ever come across a full install of it not in the old ISO format?

And along that Tiberian Sun looks like a wash still for Win7/8. The install EA supplied fails because the newest of windows doesn't have all the DLLs it needs to run and I won't trust a random site to grab easily virally infected files like that and it'll complain about various other issues. This is partly because they removed the damn installer and have you move files in various places manually and install a .reg registry file to get it to fire up meant for older windows. Is there anywhere a modern install of this has been compiled so it works?

I blew a couple hours last night trying to sort that mess out and gave up.

[Exhuminator]

C&C Red Alert -- Despite being out there free, I'm surprised that I can not find a FULL install for this game other than the original ISOs which won't work on a modern machine. Has any of you ever come across a full install of it not in the old ISO format?

I'm pretty sure that DJ Oldgames has it as a full install with Windows compatibility. I'll PM you the link.

[Pulsar_t]

If you remove the 3D element from Homeworld then what you'll find is a simple RTS game.

Even with the tiny fighters vs mid-size ships vs large-size ships dynamics and the boarding thingies that capture other mid-sized ships?

Traditional RTS games had units that used swarming and capturing tactics. Think about it; if it's a top-down game it'll be much simpler than it apparently looks.

[Tanooki]

I did more digging at the cost of my work this morning as it was driving me up the wall and I found a solution, weird one but it works.

I found one site with a downloader, but it wasn't the sketchy stuff I found but a legit one with options on top of options. The one allows you to use the existing ISOs from EA or get the files off their web server.

So going with the ISOs, had to 7zip unzip them into a directory, then let the installer see that. It installed the entire game both sides to the computer in an install around 1GB in size. It bitched when I ran the installer and I had to cancel it trying to download something, so I can't be 100% certain online (which I don't care about) will work, but the base discs made it.

[Tanooki]

Sad news, I can't play either one of them anymore. After finally settling in to mess with C&C and Red Alert, neither are playable on my system.

C&C likes to randomly crash and kick back to windows with a close box with no reason or specific visual or audio trigger that can be noticed. RA likes to just throw out progression stopping bugs where it won't trigger an event or capture so a stage can not be completed and since it's not a branch stage you're stuck.

I erased both. Probably going to download Dune 2, the OpenGL modern install/frontend community people created seemed happy on my Win7 laptop so maybe it won't crap out.

[Exhuminator]

Maybe an XP VM will run C&C within Win7?

[Pulsar_t]

If all else fails, try http://www.openra.net/

[Tanooki]

OpenRA though is modded isn't it? It's not a stock release of the game, it's a tinkered with recreation was my understanding. Also I don't care much for RA really compared to C&C which is what I was after mainly.

EX -- I suppose, but then I'd have to pirate or buy a copy of Win7. Seems like a lot of work for little return. It seems to just uniquely hate Win8.1 as I don't see much complaining online about just win7 or 8, they must have changed something.



I went and re-acquired Dune Legacy, a cool modern loader with a few excellent upgrades and tweaks for the original Dune2. The tweaks allow commonsense stuff like grabbing more than one unit at a time to move on the field (old game doesn't.) Other than that the tweaks are higher resolutions, online play, skirmish mode on any unlocked stage, stuff like that. Check it out here: http://dunelegacy.sourceforge.net/website/ All you need is the original DUNE 2 files in a directory for the installer to see, and it will pull those files into its newer install/executable world and you're good. Maybe instead of flaky cheap hacks and junk to the original start up files someone could make a program like this which isn't pissy about modern machines at all. One can dream eh?

[Exhuminator]

I suppose, but then I'd have to pirate or buy a copy of Win7.

I didn't realize you were running Win8. The same theory applies, you possibly could get C&C to run in an XP virtual machine under Win8. Or, maybe just using XP mode:

http://www.howtogeek.com/171395/how-to- ... windows-8/
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/forget-end ... 8-xp-mode/

Where there's a will, there's a way?

[Tanooki]

You're right, but I'm not desperate to take all those steps and pirate WinXP to do so.

Seriously though try out Dune 2 using that Dune Legacy program as you will not regret it.