Playing Red Alert 2
Red Alert 2 and its expansion, Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge is a core childhood memory of mine, and when I discovered I can play them from Steam and on linux via its compatibility layer, I was so excited to experience it all over again. So there I was expecting things to be smooth-sailing, but nope. For some reason, on my daily driver laptop (P14s Gen 5) the game is much slower than on my old one (now 8-years old ASUS X550VX).
Turns out, we need this tweak to be able to play it smoothly and to change its resolution:
Steps to take:
- Download the cnc-ddraw.zip from CnCNet's GitHub page
- Extract the ddraw.dll to your RA2 folder, you can find this folder in
Manage > Browse local game filesoption - Launch RA2.exe or RA2MD.exe and it should take care of the rest
- If not, you may need to make adjustments on the game properties on steam (the gear icon)
Adjust the launch option
WINEDLLOVERRIDES="ddraw.dll=n,b" %command%