Command and Conquer; Tiberian Dawn came out in 1995 and was followed shortly after in 1996 with Red Alert. Hidden in the lounge at my friend Ian’s house with his mum upstairs asleep, his chronically underpowered 233mhz pentium computer wurring away I was absolutely amazed by the entire C&C experience. The installer was immensive and fell modern and damned cool, the video’s looked beautiful and like nothing else I’d experienced and the music track was fantastic. Many hours were lost.

So now, 15 years after the first game was released lets have a go at getting it all running in time for Christmas. After a couple of days of failure (and the need to multiplay with my brother) I gave up getting it running in WINE under Linux and cracked on with a Windows 7 install.

In 2006 Westwood packaged the first 8 years of gaming into one 8gb installer. Some of the games still work “out of the  box”, others (like Generals; ironically the latest games) are a bit of a pig to get going; but they all will work!

Ready, Commander?

I’m installing this on a Windows 7 Professional x64 system. It was a clean install of Windows with all of the Updates and the right drivers. I’ve then gone through and tried it on another Win7 Pro and a Win7 Ultimate; it seems to work, but as always please get in contact and let me know if you’ve had problems.

Stick the DVD in the drive (or mount your ISO) and start the installer. Personally I do a custom installation just to avoid installing Renegade; its awful.

Type in your serial numbers, make a cup of tea and try not to be too upset its missing all the fantastic original installers.

Once the install is done, download and install the unofficial (but officially endorsed) patch for The First Decade.

More information and download links for The First Decade v1.03-r4

When you install it, make sure to Run as Administrator.

Command and Conquer; Tiberian Dawn

There are two ways to do this, either set compatibility mode to Windows 95 and live through the corrupt videos (but 1024×760 in-game resolution) but you’ll also find that alt+tab breaks horribly and you get possibly slowdown and crashes on multi-core systems.

You can change the resolution by running ccsetup.exe in the install directory (C:\Program Files (x86)\EA Games\Command & Conquer The First Decade\Command & Conquer(tm))

The easy fix is to use the cnc-ddraw.dll fix. If you’re using ddraw then you need to disable compatibility mode.

Download the file and extract it into your game folder, then run the game as usual.

If you don’t run the game as Administrator, then it refuses to save the ddraw.ini configuration file and even if you create one manually it won’t read it; if you don’t want to enable full screen or change the mouse sensitivity then you should be OK.

Note 1: Make life easier for yourself and change the permissions on the ddraw.ini file; set it so Users have full control.

Note 2: I found that when I’d enabled full screen, it would give me a blank screen until I had alt+tabbed in and out of the program, after that it was fine.

Note 3: Control + Tab to release mouse capture!

Red Alert

Exactly the same information as for Tiberian Dawn, except use the rasetup.exe to change the resolution to 640×480.

You can then edit the ddraw.ini file (see note 1 above) to either run full screen, or change the resolution to upscale the video window to something better.

Red Alert 2 & Yuri’s Revenge

Delete the wrong shortcut

For some reason after all the patching is done we end up with two shortcuts to launch Red Alert II.

Click on the start menu and type in “red alert 2″ to the “search for programs and files” box, notice the two shortcuts pop up.

Delete the one entitled “Command & Conquer™ Red Alert™ 2″; you should be left with “Red Alert 2″.

Just make it compatible

For both the Red Alert 2 and the Yuri’s Revenge shortcuts:

1. Right hand click and select properties.
2. On the Compatibility tab click “Change settings for all users” at the bottom.
3. Tick the “Run this program in compatibility mode for” box and select “Windows XP (Service Pack 3)” from the dropdown list.
4. Disabling Desktop Composition and Visual Themes doesn’t hurt either, though it doesn’t seem to be necessary.
5. Click OK to close the property boxes (and then repeat the instructions for the other shortcut).

C&C Generals and Zero Hour

Trying to start either Generals or Zero Hour flashes the splash screen and then crashes out. If you’re really lucky then it might just freeze on the splash screen and not even have the decency to crash; it just sucks CPU cycles (and in one case) takes down the browser. So, lets get it running:

1) Crash the Game;

Yup, thats right; before we start you need to try and run both Generals and Zero hour. It will crash when you run it, but it will create the savegame folders in My Documents.

2) File Permissions

We need to change the file permissions on a few folders; you need to do this for the Data and UserData folder in both the C&C Generals and the C&C Generals Zero Hour folder.

Open Windows explorer and navigate to the install directory (“C:\Program Files (x86)\EA Games\Command & Conquer The First Decade\Command & Conquer(tm) Generals”).

Right Click on the Data (or UserData) folder and click Properties. On the Security tab click Edit.

Select the entry for Users (YourComputerName\Users) and tick the Allow: Full Control checkbox. OK to save. (Make sure you do this for all the folders).

3) Create An Options File

Open Notepad and then copy/paste the following:

AntiAliasing = 1

BuildingOcclusion = yes
DrawScrollAnchor =
DynamicLOD = no
ExtraAnimations = yes
GameSpyIPAddress = 0.0.0.0
Gamma = 50
IPAddress = 0.0.0.0
IdealStaticGameLOD = High
LanguageFilter = true
MaxParticleCount = 5000
MoveScrollAnchor =
MusicVolume = 55
Resolution = 1024 768
Retaliation = yes
SFX3DVolume = 79
SFXVolume = 71
ScrollFactor = 50
SendDelay = no
ShowSoftWaterEdge = yes
ShowTrees = yes
StaticGameLOD = Custom
TextureReduction = 0
UseAlternateMouse = no
UseCloudMap = yes
UseDoubleClickAttackMove = no
UseLightMap = yes
UseShadowDecals = yes
UseShadowVolumes = yes
VoiceVolume = 100

Save the file in your My Documents folder and call it options.ini. (Make sure you set the Save As type to All Files other wise you end up with options.ini.txt which doesn’t help)

Copy the file into both “My Documents\Command and Conquer Generals Data” and “My Documents\Command and Conquer Generals Zero Hour Data”: If these folders don’t exist then you need to start the game and let it crash first.

4) Set Compatibility Mode

In the install directories (once again, do this for both Generals and Zero Hour), right hand click on the generals.exe and select properies.

Compatibility Mode -> Change settings for all users -> Run this program in compatibility mode for: Windows XP SP3.

You should find both Generals and Zero Hour to now work and run fine

Battlefield Control Online…

So there you go. If you’re starting a LAN game then make sure the Windows Firewall isn’t blocking you and otherwise rock on.

No doubt I’ve forgotten to write down a vital step, but I’m sure people will complain when it doesn’t work.

Happy Christmas and Happy Gaming.

Windows 7; Pretty Fish

The first thing that has to be noted is the absolute PITA it is to try and downland a copy of the new Windows 7 Demo.

The web page where you get the download link and a serial number (I found) to be really badly obfuscated; ActiveX being necessary to register for a serial number, meaning I had to use Internet Explorer on a windows box; which also meant using the proprietary Microsoft Downloader rather than something truly useful like wget.

All said and done, the download manager did its job nicely; throughout multiple pauses and internet disconnects the MS Download Manager managed to download the 2.4GB and 3.2GB .iso images (I downloaded both the 32 and 64bit versions) successfully, and without any noticeable corruption (although without including as much as a simple MD5 hash to check, its hard to tell).

It was at this point I realised I had a broken install of VMware Workstation and faffed about with this for a few days, before getting compltely distracted by having my internet connection die horribly and take over a week and 3 different PCs to make work again.

I found myself reading about the serious security flaws with UAC Whitelist vulnerabilities over on PretentiousName.com by Leo Davidson, which allows the complete screwing over of a Windows 7 box by virtue of these UAC controls in the first place.

As I understand it, UAC makes sure to prompt you, to consent to allowing changes to be made to your system, except its a little more than this. It lets you run code at different levels of elevation, giving it different sets of permissions, or rather privileges (including different memory address spaces). I get the feeling its supposed to work a bit like sudo on linux/OSX, except its nothing like it at all. You seem to be able to set UAC to multiple levels of prompting, except it seems in most cases, the default, and the most annoying option (as you might know from vista) is to endlessly keep asking for permission every time you try and sneeze.

Except in windows 7 its trivial to get past this, for any program that wishes. Esentially anything legitimate and that conforms will have to prompt and annoy you every time it wishes to do anything, where as virii and other malicious code can elevate without prompting, this defeating the whole frakin’ point of it in the first pace.

Actually, its not just malicious code that can elevate without prompting; some of the core Microsoft utilites provided with the OS can run in ‘admin’ mode without asking for permission. Except for “some” please read approximately 70, and for “core utilities” think calculator. -Anyway, have a look at this video by Leo Davidson. “Davidson told El Reg that it took him longer to create demonstration videos than to figure out how to turn a “copy a file” concept into a potential “own the machine” technique.”, which in my opinion sums up a lot of my recent projects.

Anyways, it was Davidson’s videos that got me to see the new default background for Windows 7; a lovely Siamese fighting fish, and on the basis of “Oooh! That looks just like the fish I used to have!”, cracked on with getting the demo installed.

Which went pretty flawlessly, I have to say.

VMware workstation made it very simple to create a new Virtual Machine. As it didn’ t have Windows7 in the list of default machines, I selected Windows Server 2008 and gave the virtual machine a 15GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM.

I have an old AND64 processor and run an Gentoo x86_64 on my host computer. I decided to install the 64bit version of windows.

The .iso booted nicely, and the install screen asks for date and locale settings right at the start (which is a nice change) and then goes about copying and then installing all of the data. The nice thing to note, was that the installer realised it was inside of VMware and released control of the cursor when you scrolled out of the window. Usually you have to wait until you have VMware Tools installed in the guest OS before you get this sort of functionality.

The install took about 30minutes to decompress all of the files, and I left it to get on with things as I piddled about on the internet. Once finished the installer rebooted, and I had to remember to unmount the install CD as it booted back off that.

Another reboot later and the screen-size flashed a couple of times before trying to go full screen, causing Xorg to segfault horribly and for me to reboot my computer. Even though the setup was (AFAIK) finished, I’m now left with an amusingly broken Windows 7 Desktop.

The machine boots without any problems and dumps me on a desktop, however whenever I try and open My Computer, Control Panel or really try and do anything I get a lovely popup saying “Windows cannot access the specified device, path or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access them”.

After about a minute you get a nice little message box telling you that “Windows Explorer has stopped working” and that its currently searching for a solution. A minute or so later and box goes away without any prompting, leaving you back on the desktop with a none working system. Trying the “Send Feedback” button is a hiding to nothing as well.

The one thing that does work (up to a point) is the Microsoft Management Console. Strangely, when looking at disk usage it seems to have split my 15GB drive into two partitions. I’m assuming the boot partition also holds the recovery data and a copy of the install data -this would explain why the install first copied and then extracted the files off the CD.

It has to be said at this juncture, that the new OS does boot and shut-down extremely quickly, far quicker than any Vista box I’ve ever seen. And whilst it doesn’t have all the working functionality “straight out of the box” that I might like, it does have a fish rather than a picture of Hitler, which I rather like.

OK, me thinks, not a problem. Windows Vista is supped to have even better recovery options than previous versions, so lets see if we can do anything. Pounding F8 at boot gives a usual Windows boot menu, but with the option to “Repair Your Computer” being at the top of the list (although ironically, my arrow keys don’t work on the keyboard so I can’t scroll up or down to select anything else ).

Selecting this, we get booted to a very basic (and low resolution) desktop environment where after selecting settings and entering a valid username and password, we are given a list of System Recovery Options.

• Startup Repair is the first on the list, and after running this I find it takes a couple of minutes, a lovely box telling me its fixing things, and then reboots, so thats all good.
• System Restore is the same old, except I have no restore points for it to roll back to, so that’s a waste of time.
• System Image Recovery seems rather nice, but I can’t find out how to create the image in the first place.
• Windows Memory Diagnostic reboots the computer into a very basic looking memtest.
• Command Prompt gives you an Administrator Command Prompt.

All in all a waste of time. I wonder if booting off the CD will fair any better.

Selecting Repair from the CD sends it into a Startup Repair again, although this time its taking a good 25min or so…. and then fails in exactly the same way. Unknown problem (all tests report back OK) and Windows cannot automatically fix this problem.

Frankly, I’m bored of Windows 7 already. I might try a fresh reinstall, or even try it in VirtualBox (which I rather like). There’s just as much chance that I’ll sack it off and play with openSolaris instead.

edit:
I forgot to try pressing [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Delete] whilst sat at the fish. I wonder it it makes its eyes flash.