A Command & Conquer emulator to preserve the alpha client of the game for future generations.
I bought the first decade collection especially for this CnC games, as i already owned all of the titles it contained. I was disappointed to find out that the online servers were shut down when i found the time to finally play this. Sadly there is no official way to play this game, so i had the client on my disk for ages in the hope someone would write a proper emulator one day. Just recently i stumbled across someone finally bypassing the origin activation screen, so i directly started to work.
There was already someone working on this (Xevrac), and i took a quick look on that project firsthand. As of writing, his current state is barely anything further than mine. Sadly the used techstack (.NET Framework 4.6, Windows-only UI), being just a copy&paste from a battlefield emulator, and the code quality did definitely not reflect my vision. So instead of somewhat taking over or forking his project to completely overhaul his codebase, i decided to start from scratch and do my own researches. This seems the fairest approach from my side, as im not planning to steal anyones work, nor do i want to be first or ahead. Im working on game preservation purely for the fun of doing it.
I have no idea if this will ever be finished, as i have too many projects running already, but i will try my best to get this working.
- A copy of the game with version 150805 (see Info_Win32_final.BuildSettings file contents)
- A Patched (no-origin) executable, otherwise the game will fail to start at all
- Run the ClientPatcher to re-target the game to the new server instead of the defunct one
- a new main menu must be made to get the game to do anything
- figure out how to launch a simple game, by using the right javascript calls
- the game protocol itself (blaze) uses another socket. Upon reaching that point, that must be properly emulated too
- Xevrac for sharing some insights on how to get the game to start.
Ofcourse, this project is not affiliated with EA in any way! Im not trying to steal anyones work, and i will not publish any of the original game files. You need to own a copy of the game files to make this work, and you need to find a patched executable yourself. I will not provide any help on how to do this, as this is not the purpose of this project.