I'll believe it when I see it, post-release.....

Good timing after the Blizzard screwup but I'm sure they'll be sure to strap some Denuvo on there.
Anyone else tired of seeing "4k" touted as a feature so much? Wooptiedoo you support a resolution! Amazing! Will they support Keyboard and Mouse as well?

Dune II remaster please (yes I know Dune 2000 exists). C&C and RA already gor two updates, fitst in the 10th anniversary anthology then in the 25th anniversary one. The former works perfectly for XP the latter works perfectly on Win10 and is readily available on Origin. I would rather have update/remaster to a game that needs it..

appiah4 wrote:

Dune II remaster please (yes I know Dune 2000 exists). C&C and RA already gor two updates, fitst in the 10th anniversary anthology then in the 25th anniversary one. The former works perfectly for XP the latter works perfectly on Win10 and is readily available on Origin. I would rather have update/remaster to a game that needs it..

I've been under the impression rights for Dune are a mess, so I'm not sure they even could do a Dune II remaster even if they wanted.

While I'm a huge fan of Westwood C&C games I'm pretty indifferent for the remasters, I can play the originals just fine as they are. Though if Klepacki's re-recorded/remixed soundtrack is good enough I wouldn't mind if some modder would find a way to move that to the originals. I love the music in the original C&C games, but I think they are 22KHz or something..

[Thread moved to Milliways Section]

Well after the mess that EA made of the final C&C "we are giving the fans what they want and going back to C&C roots... actually no we know better here is something completely different"
let's see how this goes. Although it sounds very much like EA just trying to squeeze a few more dollars out of the C&C name. Sadly

Not to mention how they screwed up C&C: Generals 2 so bad it was cancelled/abandoned. Generals/Zero Hour was my favorite C&C release.

I've seen some articles and videos about this, and I just find it disturbing that many of them applaud EA's announcement for saying the games won't have "micro" transactions (there's nothing "micro" about in-game transactions these days.) We got to a point now where we applaud a company for not screwing us over... Shouldn't that be, like, the normal state of affairs? Not being a scumbag doesn't deserve applause. It should just go without saying. But games having "micro" transactions is what goes without saying now. It's the new normal...

Video games are dead, I tell ya. And even these remasters I view with a huge dose of cynicism. I absolutely expect them to do something scummy when they release them.

realnc wrote:

I've seen some articles and videos about this, and I just find it disturbing that many of them applaud EA's announcement for saying the games won't have "micro" transactions (there's nothing "micro" about in-game transactions these days.) We got to a point now where we applaud a company for not screwing us over... Shouldn't that be, like, the normal state of affairs? Not being a scumbag doesn't deserve applause. It should just go without saying. But games having "micro" transactions is what goes without saying now. It's the new normal...

Video games are dead, I tell ya. And even these remasters I view with a huge dose of cynicism. I absolutely expect them to do something scummy when they release them.

While I wouldn't put it past EA making units cost real money or popping up ads periodically while playing, honestly I'm expecting the only scumminess here being very low effort release. I wonder do they still have the raw video footage somewhere stashed away, it would be awful if they would make new videos with some new crappy actors or just scrap them altogether.

They should remaster Warcraft 2 as well. Even though fans of Warcraft 2 wish for it, its difficult to guess whether it's gonna be remaster or not.

Muz wrote:

They should remaster Warcraft 2 as well. Even though fans of Warcraft 2 wish for it, its difficult to guess whether it's gonna be remaster or not.

Knowing the shitbag Activision Blizzard are you will get the remaster with the Human campaign, the Orc campaign will be part of the Season Pass, the expansion will be a DLC and they will add unit skin microstransactions.

No thanks.

I'm not really a big fan of remasters. Fixing problems with War2:BNE would be enough (which mainly means replacing IPX with TCP/IP for network play).
Similarly for C&C.

Azarien wrote:

Similarly for C&C.

Unlike Warcraft II the first two C&C games use low-res VGA graphics that do not translate well onto modern screens due to the aspect ratio issue. The official Windows versions simply ignore this problem, as does OpenRA as far as I can tell, so the graphics are only rendered correctly/as originally intended if you're either playing on a 4:3 monitor in 640x400 (for Win95 versions) mode or use DOSBox with aspect ratio correction on.

It would be neat if the C&C visuals were updated to SVGA with correct aspect ratio, but that would be a "remaster" that is like 20 years overdue. Bringing both games to 4K resolution or whatever this is called (like in StarCraft Remastered or Age of Empires Definitive Edition) will probably involve a huge amount of redrawing everything and adding lots of detail which are by necessity missing from the original low-res sprites. Also personally I'm a bit concerned that the end result might disagree with the game itself if the mechanics are left what they are; some of the core aspects were still in infant stages, like the almost nonexistent AI.

That said I suppose that maybe a more or less complete remake would be more appropriate in case of these titles.

I remember Tib Sun multiplayer on Westwood Online.

Everybody played those stupid 'gold maps'. Just mass and rush. GG. No strategy.

MrFlibble wrote:

Azarien wrote:

Similarly for C&C.

Unlike Warcraft II the first two C&C games use low-res VGA graphics that do not translate well onto modern screens due to the aspect ratio issue. The official Windows versions simply ignore this problem, as does OpenRA as far as I can tell, so the graphics are only rendered correctly/as originally intended if you're either playing on a 4:3 monitor in 640x400 (for Win95 versions) mode or use DOSBox with aspect ratio correction on.

There are a few ways to get the Windows version to run in correct aspect ratio or close to it too. The higher resolution monitor you have the better the results will be.

One of the reasons I want a 4K monitor actually. To get better scaling quality on a 1997 video game 🤣

ZellSF wrote:

There are a few ways to get the Windows version to run in correct aspect ratio or close to it too. The higher resolution monitor you have the better the results will be.

I'm not aware of this, please tell more.

Generally, is there a way to force 4:3 aspect ratio on a widescreen display if for example you have a Windows game that runs in 320x200 or a factor of the same? Like OpenTyrian or the ports of Abuse which IIRC ignored the aspect ratio issue too?

But back to C&C the trick is that I don't quite like how they decided to simply up the resolution in the Macintosh port and subsequently the Win95 version of RA and C&C Gold Edition. I'd rather Westwood took the Blizzard approach and upscaled the graphics too, like what was done to the Mac port of Warcraft 1. However I suspect that they did not do that because unlike Warcraft which ended up relatively decent even with the rushed and incomplete upscale the C&C graphics probably would not look very good without a substantial overhaul of everything.

MrFlibble wrote:

ZellSF wrote:

There are a few ways to get the Windows version to run in correct aspect ratio or close to it too. The higher resolution monitor you have the better the results will be.

I'm not aware of this, please tell more.

Generally, is there a way to force 4:3 aspect ratio on a widescreen display if for example you have a Windows game that runs in 320x200 or a factor of the same? Like OpenTyrian or the ports of Abuse which IIRC ignored the aspect ratio issue too?

You can't do anything about your driver or display scaling (well maybe, but it would be complicated), so there is no universal solution for all games, but you can use various wrapper utilities to resize the game screen before it's sent to the GPU driver.

cnc-ddraw for example is specifically made for C&C95 and Red Alert and can resize the game's output to any arbitrary resolution via either nearest or linear filtering.

It's not the best way to do it, but some of the other ways are a bit too GPU/monitor specific. I integer scale to 4000x2400 (widescreen mod installed and set to 800x400) and set that as a custom resolution in my GPU drivers.

I would like to add the factum that the patched out The First Decade versions of the original games still run perfectly under Win98 with all additions and conveniences that the unofficial community patches and TFD 1.3 unofficial brings with it.

The reason being that Win98 barely keeps on running those by supporting both .NET Framework 2.0 and C++ Redist Package 2005 (both the last versions to support Win98)

After installing TFD 1.3 unofficial and patching each title individually with the newest recommended patches will result in the old titles being patched out, enabling higher resolutions and various crashfixes and renders these games totally playable even with higher resolutions and tweaks under Win98SE. Patches may have to be applied on a newer XP system and existing WSock32.dll files need to be deleted/replaced as Win98 expects older one / as the game expects newer ones, but after patching them with the patches listed in the following list - after copying the bare Gamefolders over to Win98 they... just run. Perfectly.

Here's my readme I created for my forgetful self two years back..:

"Copy out SUN before applying the 1.03 unofficial patch. You need to have it unpatched in order for the TSPatch to work properly.
After applying the 1.03 patch, overwrite SUN again with the unpatched backup before proceeding to apply the other patches.

- OR -

Install everything except SUN. Apply 1.03 community patch. Afterwards add SUN through the installer and use further patches on all games.

Patches:

TD --> cc95v106c_r3_u4.exe (Nyerguds Patch)
RA --> RA1installer.exe (funkyfr3sh's Patcher)
SUN --> TSpatch.exe (funkyfr3sh's Patcher)
RA2 --> CnCNet5_YR_Installer.exe (updates a few things, nothing more)

After patched like this, you can just slap them over to the target Win98SE machine. If the game gets uptight about the wsock32.dll being too new, delete it or replace it.

PS: Be sure to have .NET Framework 2.0 and C++ Redist Package 2005 installed on your Win98SE machine.

Thank's to fans and modding community you can download the online installers of RA and TD with the latest unofficial community patches and you can adjust the resolution to whatever you desire. The same goes for the Dune 2000 unofficial patch.