Command & Conquer: Red Alert
2 ports
OpenRA
OpenRA/OpenRA
OpenRA: a free real-time strategy engine, written in C#, that recreates and modernizes three Westwood games: Command & Conquer (Tiberian Dawn), Command & Conquer: Red Alert, and Dune 2000, each as its own “mod”; Tiberian Sun support is still in development and isn’t in the installer. It’s a reimplementation built by reverse engineering the games’ files, without disassembling or patching the original executables. It doesn’t aim to be an exact copy: it adds right-click or classic left-click controls, sidebars with production queues and hotkeys, attack-move and unit stances, fog of war, veterancy, capturable tech structures, replays, and an observer interface. It has online multiplayer, a map editor, Lua-scripted missions, and an SDK for building your own games on the engine, and it runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The latest stable release is release-20250330 (March 30, 2025); playtest-20261011 (October 11) completes the Dune 2000 campaign, moves the engine to .NET 10, and adds Windows on ARM and aarch64 Linux builds. One of its more than 30,000 commits, from October 15, lists Claude as a co-author. On first launch, the content manager offers to download each game’s base files, without music or videos, from the project’s mirror servers: the Red Alert and Tiberian Dawn files come from the releases EA made available as freeware, and the Dune 2000 files, along with its 1.06 patch files, from a mirror of the game’s files. This is optional: it can also copy them, along with the music and videos, from the discs or from an installed copy. The project says it uses those files under the license granted by EA’s C&C Franchise Modding Guidelines.
You needThe original games’ files: on first launch it can download the base files, or copy them from your own discs (mounted ISOs work too) or from a The First Decade, The Ultimate Collection, or Remastered Collection install on Steam or Origin; for Dune 2000, the English disc or the Gruntmods Edition. Campaign music and videos can only be copied from the discs or those installs. Plus Windows 7 or later with DirectX 11 or OpenGL 3, macOS 10.11 or later, or 64-bit Linux (one AppImage per game).
Vanilla Conquer
TheAssemblyArmada/Vanilla-Conquer
Vanilla Conquer: a portable version of the first-generation Command & Conquer engine that runs Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert on Windows, Linux, macOS, and the BSDs with SDL and OpenAL. It builds on the Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert source code EA released alongside the Remastered Collection and aims to keep the games as they were at release, working as a drop-in replacement for the original executables (vanillatd and vanillara) with bug fixes, compatibility fixes, and quality-of-life improvements. It also builds both games’ DLLs as mods for the Remastered Collection, which makes it useful for Remastered mod development. It includes a tool for MIX files. There are no numbered releases: it publishes development builds for Windows (32- and 64-bit), Linux, and macOS with every change, the latest on July 16. The README links to the editions EA released as freeware: the Command & Conquer Gold ISOs (GDI and NOD) on ModDB and the Red Alert CD through EA’s archived page, plus the official Red Alert demo.
You needThe files from your own copy of the classic games: you copy vanillatd.exe or vanillara.exe (on Windows, along with SDL2.dll and OpenAL32.dll) into the game folder. The freeware Command & Conquer Gold and Red Alert releases work, and the Red Alert demo is fully playable; data from the Remastered Collection, The Ultimate Collection, or The First Decade isn’t supported yet. The Remastered mods need your copy of the Remastered Collection. Plus Windows, Linux, or macOS.
Installs with
Questions
What projects are there for Command & Conquer: Red Alert?
The catalog has 2 ports for Command & Conquer: Red Alert, all on this page with their status.
What do I need to play it?
Your own copy of Command & Conquer: Red Alert (DOS). Recompendium only links projects that don’t distribute the game, and each entry says which version or region you need.
Which one is the most popular?
OpenRA, with 17,697 stars on GitHub.