Chronic Red Alert 2 Crashes in Win7

[dorker]

Recently I decided to revive my old Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge games on my new win7 machine. The problem is that RA2 runs for anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes until it just crashes- "The main executable for Red Alert 2 has stopped working..."

The game did pretty much the same thing on my winXP install, and with the added bonus of some graphical glitches.

I have tried running it in compatibility mode for XP SP2 (I had SP3 before and there were some know issues with that), 2000, 98, and 95, and as an admin.

If it makes any difference, I am running the game from the CD. I also had it installed with the C&C First Decade compilation, but had the same problems there.

I would appreciate any help in reliving the great game!

 

[HEXiT]

yuris revenge will only work on xp. any other newer o.s. will just cause it to crash.
even when you get it working on xp its very unstable and needs patching, but again it really is hit and miss whether it will work as it was badly written.

 

[dorker]

yuris revenge will only work on xp. any other newer o.s. will just cause it to crash.
even when you get it working on xp its very unstable and needs patching, but again it really is hit and miss whether it will work as it was badly written.

Good to know that.

So should I just throw in the towel when it comes to YR, or is it possible to run in compatibility mode for 95/98/2000?

 

[HEXiT]

i never managed to get it running on win 7 at all. so yeah i think giving up on it is probably the best thing.


there is 1 thing you could try and thats running xp in vmware. you may be able to get it running on the xp virtual machine if you have 7 pro or better.

UPDATE* i did some googling and a lot of people have apparently gotten it to work, buy setting every .exe to xp (sp2) compatibility mode. they are specific in that they say every exe.

now im gonna break out my 10 year compilation box and give this a try as its the only 1 i havent managed to play 😉

 

[dorker]

i never managed to get it running on win 7 at all. so yeah i think giving up on it is probably the best thing.


there is 1 thing you could try and thats running xp in vmware. you may be able to get it running on the xp virtual machine if you have 7 pro or better.

UPDATE* i did some googling and a lot of people have apparently gotten it to work, buy setting every .exe to xp (sp2) compatibility mode. they are specific in that they say every exe.

now im gonna break out my 10 year compilation box and give this a try as its the only 1 i havent managed to play 😉

I went into the game directory and found 5 items with the filetype 'application' and changed the compatibility settings on all those to XP SP2.

Those 5 are 'game' ; 'mph' ; 'ra2' ; 'Uninst' ; and 'uninstll' and are located C:\Program Files\Westwood\RA2.
I tweaked those 5 and still got a game crash. Do you know if I missed something?

I'll probably try vmware next if this doesn't work out

Thanks for the help!

 

[HEXiT]

go to the folder and then go to the search bar at the top corner. type in *.exe
it will then list all the exe files in the dir tree.
if theres only 5 then you havent missed anything.

 

[Herr_Koos]

Strange.. Both RA2 and YR work perfectly for me in Windows 7 (as part of the First Decade collection). No hacks or funny workarounds required.

Both games are obviously quite old by now, but it may be worthwhile patching them to the latest version anyway.

 

[roy2646]

Red Alert 2 is stable in windows 7 ultimate 32 bit unlike in 64 bit version that it is not working well...