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Red Alert 1 Released As Freeware
Ciaran_H writes "Command & Conquer: Red Alert 1 was released as freeware on C&C's 13th anniversary. The Soviet and Allied CDs are available for download on EA's site. With the freeware release of the original Command & Conquer: Tiberium Dawn having taken place last year for the 12th anniversary, two of the most popular RTS games are now available completely free."
EA is also offering a free download of Red Alert 2 with a pre-order of the upcoming Red Alert 3. The above link has a trailer for the new game, which includes appearances from George Takei, Tim Curry, Jenny McCarthy, and others.
Red Alert used a fsckton of FMV, so they split the campaigns over two discs. Plus, it made an excuse for Westwood to pack two discs, so a friend could play RA when they came to your place for a LAN party or something.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
When EA releases C&C games as freeware, they really mean it. Back during the "12th anniversary" celebration, they released the Command and Conquer Gold. It's still free a year later.
http://www.gamershell.com/news_41337.html
C&C Gold and RA look about the same graphicswise, and they both require a little bit of configuration on modern machines to run smoothly (to run with sound and arrow keys working properly), but it's worth it.
I have literally /always/ had better performance with dosemu for games, with out it taking much CPU usage. Hence why I use it.
YMMV, I guess. I like dosemu, but it emulates DOS so well that I always end up revisiting my days of trying to get enough conventional memory going before I can start a game. DOSBox takes care of that. It's not dosemu's fault, it's a result of them being a full emulator. You can replace the freedos they supply with MS-DOS and it'll work.
DOSBox has all the drivers you need (like sound blaster and mouse) already "loaded" without actually taking up any memory that the DOS applications can see. So 640k ends up actually being enough for anyone :)
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Option A: wine
- use winecfg to set windows version to 98.
- before installation copy the contents of CD1 (allied) to a local directory
- use winecfg to configure a cdrom drive (F: for example) to point to it
- further, in winecfg set the corresponding cdrom label to 'CD1'
- run the installer;
$ wine F:/SETUP95/INSTALL.EXE
- copy the included PATCH.* from the XP_Patch subdir to the REDALERT installation folder
- run the inlcuded update patch;
$ wine C:/WESTWOOD/REDALERT/PATCH.EXE
- run the game;
$ wine C:/WESTWOOD/REDALERT/RA95.EXE
Option B: freera (haven't tried it though)
Happy world domination!
:(){