Oh, now that's cool. I didn't know about this.

The CnC games are probably my favorite RTS titles. I own all of them on physical media still, as well as on Steam and EA's silly store. Still play them today.

Fun fact, that "TR" at the end of my name is a holdover from the 90's and early 2000's. My friends and I started a Command & Conquer clan and would play all the time. It was called "Tiberian Republic". Good times. It went well into the Renegade days where we played together online several times a week.

As far as RA being slow on 486DX's, I recall that as well. Would love to see a fast RA. 😀

I think Red Alert 2 had some IP hell with support libraries, I dunno why they couldn't just release the source without that part, but that would take effort to replace, I suppose.

So who's getting this to run on a 286 💾

Played RA1 to death on a DX2/66 I remember the game pausing for a second every few seconds on maps with loads of units. It was annoying but C&C/RA were my favourite games so put up with it.
I'd totally be up for "Fast RA"

So far this fork's farthest along
https://github.com/jamesu/CnC_Red_Alert

Can compile for DOS and Windows but there's no sound library.

before "why not vanilla conquer" there's accuracy issues with regards to behaviors and wasn't as active as it used to be and you could only do so much from the remastered sources.

also before "data project" there's no foss CLI tools that I know of that can assemble SHPs and FNTs from PNGs and there's not really much foss palette remapping image converters that don't 'optimize' either. In theory it'd be doable to have Blender export all the graphics one needs in a batch process but the pipeline to the westwood formats aren't clear cut and platform agnostic. VQA encoding i'm not sure about either.

EDIT: A newer fork:
https://github.com/Daft-Freak/CnC_Red_Alert

leileilol wrote on 2025-03-07, 19:15:

EDIT: A newer fork:
https://github.com/Daft-Freak/CnC_Red_Alert

Some big news worth a bump: this SDL port can now be compiled and played!!! Also the same repo covers Tiberian Dawn too.

What is the recompiled version using for sound card setup under DOS?

If I remember correctly, the original C&C and RA1 used the HMI sound system, which supported WSS and AudioDrive functionality, among other things.

The SDL port is using SDL to replace Directsound routines. They compile out to SDL versions of the Win95 versions of the games. I've only tried them on Linux so far, also it's still very early. No idea if they have plans to also compile SDL'd DOS versions, editors or any of the tools. And to be extra clear - this is a SDL port's repository. It doesn't mean they have porting goals to DOS, usually it's the first kind of port that's attempted these days as that means it could compile for any platform that's current.

Nice to see this released. Will surely watch what Daft-Freak does with it, on github.

The remakes, porting and tweaking efforts on these games have been going in many different directions, but the past years it seems to stall a bit.

I will mention these two:

https://github.com/TheAssemblyArmada/Vanilla-Conquer/
So they replaced the original sound and DirectDraw libraries with SDL2, and that made the games more thread-safe, thus less crash-prone
on multi-core CPUs.
I would say, since around august 2024 the most annoying bugs are fixed, or were easy to fix in my custom build. So skirmish games in Red Alert and Tiberium Dawn are enjoyable IMO, and skirmish is what I prefer to play. Still limited to 640x400 resolution, but that is OK.
I am hoping the main developers get some new motivation to improve on it. Currently it seems they don't care anymore, and I doubt they play this themselves. Since even my posted issues with attached fixes, are just sitting there for many months.

https://github.com/OpenRA/raclassic
Skirmish AI is a refreshingly different from the original game and source-ports.
But this 'classic' mod is seemingly not getting any attention anymore, except some SDK rebasing.
Quite playable AFAIK, but it is missing things that I am sure were proper in my old custom OpenRA classic mod from 2016.