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Possibly destination port 6667 (IRC) is being blocked somewhere between you and the CnCNet IRC servers (see this post). Boot up a Linux live CD and run the command traceroute -p 6667 irc.cncnet.org to verify if that's the case (if from a certain port on you only see asterisks instead of replies, it's being blocked there). Should it turn out it's being blocked indeed, you're unfortunately a bit out of luck for now (unless you have a way to connect that would let you avoid the block, such as VPN or proxy). Both TI and YR use Rampastring's client which (unlike FunkyFr3sh's client for TD/RA1/D2k/TS) currently doesn't allow to specify alternate destination ports. If it's your ISP who is blocking the port (one of the first few hops in the traceroute), you'd simply have to try connecting from a location served by another ISP who does not impose such a restriction. That's another good way to troubleshoot the issue - if he cannot connect to the default port with Funky's client either, but can connect fine to the alternate ones, that would be another indication of destination port 6667 being blocked on his route to the CnCNet IRC servers.

That looks nice indeed, care to share the image? It seems to me that the issue is not really the relatively low resolution of the source image, but rather the very rudimentary scaling capabilities of the client. From what I can tell it can only do nearest-neighbor upscaling of smaller images (which results in pixellation), and doesn't do any downscaling at all (cropping the lower/right portions of a larger image instead). If it applied a soft filter on upscaling (like bilinear, anything above like bicubic or Lanczos is too sharp already - a background shouldn't be competing in detail with the foreground), a lower-res background would effectively look a lot better. Attached are the original images (converted from indexed-color to RGB) along with versions upscaled to 1072x670 (default client window height, I suppose most people use that window size) with a bilinear filter - it helps reduce blockiness, and the softening minimizes any adverse impact of forground font readability. (I also reminded myself that the background image doesn't need to be named CnCNet5ClientBackground.png necessarily, you can select any supported image from the client settings dialog, so the image files themselves have descriptive names this time.) cncnet5_client_classic_bg_ra1_ts_1072x670.zip

That's your problem right there, just don't install it there. Giving full control access to the file for your regular Users group indeed doesn't seem to cut it. To work around the write access restrictions imposed by Windows on that directory you would need to run the client as admin, or set the " RUNASADMIN " appcompat flag for the client executable (and preferably also for all other executables in your game directory, as well as game.dat which is the CnCNet 5 YR executable, so that the game itself can actually modify its own INI files ra2.ini and ra2md.ini ). Instead, just reinstall the game outside of any " Program Files* " directory on your system volume. (It might be worthy to make some warning/info on this sticky, as the issue is obviously a recurrent one, especially given that TFD installs to " %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Program Files " by default (and ends up in " Program Files (x86) " if the OS is 64-bit)).

I reported that problem a few weeks ago already, but given that the client had been last updated over a month ago, it hasn't been fixed yet. For now, don't use 16 character nicks (even though the client permits it) but limit yourself to 15 characters at most.

Nah, in the particular case shown in the picture those were pairs of directed double quotation marks (chars 0x93 and [code]0x94 [/code]). Not sure why you'd want to place " diz " on separate lines. From what I understand a random line is being read from the file and displayed, so any newline chars and beyond are irrelevant anyway.

The TS "liefile" contains some non-ASCII characters (specifically the ellipsis char 0x85 and fancy quotation marks [code]0x92 [/code], [code]0x93 [/code], 0x94 ) that the client for some reason apparently fails to either read from the file or interpret correctly (it does display them correctly though if they are entered into the chat), displaying garbage characters instead. Attached is a version of the file where all "offending" characters have been replaced by their ASCII counterparts. ts-hints.txt

First try to log in to get to the main lobby, and once there type the /reset command into the chat - this should restore CnCNet 5 to its default settings and force an update. If that doesn't help, redownload CnCNet RA or PortableRA (the latter comes with the CnCNet 5 client as well, besides being a full game with campaigns and music) and install it into a different directory than your old install (you can have multiple installs with no problem, as these RA1 distributions don't use the old Westwood registry settings - in fact AFAIK they don't use the registry at all, hence both being portable). If a new install works fine, then make a backup of its INI files (the most important are redalert.ini , ddraw.ini , cncnet.ini , and spawn.ini ). Then you can try to gradually copy over your old install's INI files to the new install (so that you don't have to reconfigure everything from scratch), one by one. Should it break again at some point, just restore the last INI file you copied from the backup you have made earlier. Should the problem persist, try to recall what changes were made to your system about the time it started occuring. The OS reinstall suggested above is most likely quite a bit of an overkill (though should it really be necessary to get RA1 working again, you'd probably have much bigger problems than just RA1 not working). (BTW, if error messages are shown, it's important to quote them verbatim when seeking help. Just saying "a message came up saying error something blah blah blah now help me lol" isn't a particularly effective way to do that.)

Are you absolutely sure that this is actually the case? Such a situation would imply your game using the custom INI file in one game mode, but falling back to the standard one in another, which isn't something I had ever seen or heard of happening. It's all or nothing really - if you place a specific INI file in the game directory, it overrides the embedded one completely, no matter what the game mode. The new playlist works for me in all game modes, no matter if campaign, skirmish, LAN, or CnCNet (haven't tested WOL/XWIS, but I'm rather sure it'd be no different either). Please copy the four files from the addon ZIP's RA2 folder into your game directory again (plus the latest batch file in case you didn't redownload v1.00b), run the batch file, make a screenshot of the cmd window when it concludes, and post it here. Better yet, post a listing of your game directory too. To do that, first open a new cmd window, and navigate to your game directory using the cd command. To change the drive (if necessary), enter just the drive designation once, for instance D: (followed by the enter key) to change to the D drive, etc. Once in your RA2/YR directory, run the folowing command: dir /oen > ra2dir.txt Open the resulting text file, copy its contents, upload it to pastebin and post the link.

With a bit of patience, "upgrading" messages could most likely be concocted from the existing voice material (such as "unit speed/armor/whatever UPGRAded" and "builDING", for instance). "Wormsign" on the other hand seems quite a bit more difficult, to say the least...

There indeed was a bug in the batch file, I forgot that batch files being run as admin work by default from "%WINDIR%\system32 " rather than from where they're being run from, thanks for helping catch that. That pretty much sounds like you didn't actually copy all the files from the "RA2 " folder in the ZIP into your game directory. If you completely ignored the batch file but copied the other three, you'd still have three new, properly labeled tracks in the playlist. At least thememd.ini seems missing, without it the playlist won't budge by a bit at all. I updated the addon fixing the run-as-admin bug, and the batch file will now also check for each and every needed file and report whatever should be missing. Tested on Win7 64-bit (both normal and admin mode) and WinXP 32-bit, all works fine if all files are there. Only the batch file has changed, so you can just grab it from the attachment to this post rather than downloading the whole thing again. Should problems persist, post a screenshot of the batch cmd window. ra2_music_to_yr.zip

The YR executable requires a Win98 compatibility setting to work on XP, and as the file in question has a .dat extension, it's not as trivial to configure as it might seem at first. Please refer to this post where I showed a method to accomplish this. (Mods: perhaps it might make sense to have that info pinned somehow, as that thread inevitably got buried while the issue is likely expected to be creeping up every now and then.)

Given that I admittedly had never been much of a fan of the default "map" client backgrounds, I was trying out some original game background files with it, and found the following two to work suprisingly well: RA\redalert.mix\hires.mix\sovpaper.pcx SUN\tibsun.mix\local.mix\dbak6440.pcx (Some colors may be a bit inaccurate due to Imgur recompressing images, especially that greenish tint on the last one is quite a bit off.) The images scale quite well and still look nice even with a maximized client window, and some pixellation that becomes visible actually adds a lot of charme to it as it is a bit of a throwback to the old interfaces. An issue that had been raised with the CnCNet 5 client was how it supposedly had very little to none of the look-and-feel of the original game interfaces, and I think these images serving as background help address this concern at least somewhat. An archive with the images is attached; the files come in PNG format and are renamed to CnCNet5ClientBackground.png , so they are ready to use with the CnCNet5 client (image needs to be put in " <game_directory>\CnCNet5\Others\ ", make a backup of the existing file before overwriting). cncnet5_ra1_ts_classic_backgrounds.zip

I noticed that the ShowAllMusic and RandomStartingSong flags now work with ra95-spawn.exe as well, great stuff! So my ears didn't fool me - thanks for confirming! (BTW it's interesting how that kind of glitch came to be in the first place. It definitely sounds like something caused by analog equipment - might have happened while transferring the audio from tapes or something). I noticed that my correction of the remaining track names still isn't all though - curiously, all of the standard 35 tracks' lengths shown in the in-game playlist are about 8 seconds less that the actual track length (given that the difference seems roughly constant, it doesn't seem to be the same problem that the TS/FS track length data had). Unfortunately I'm not sure where these are stored in RA1, and couldn't really find any information on that either.

Installing stuff to " %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Program Files*\ " i s best avoided in Vista and newer, as the operating system restricts programs from write access in that location. Reinstall RA2/YR to another location outside of " C:\Program Files (x86)\ ".

The addon has been updated with additional music control files providing alternate track ordering. A file specifically providing the track order you are requesting is also attached to this post (just place it in your game folder, replacing the existing one). (RA2 tracks before YR tracks should be kept as default IMHO though, as it's the general rule for expansion music to follow base game music; the only exception being Tiberian Dawn, and TBH I'm not quite sure whether that was even intentional or just a side effect.) thememd.ini