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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

Do you mean that part at 3:47 where it sounded like it was going slightly out of tune for a moment? If so, then that too might have been fixed already. In an mp3 that I had made from the old vr2.aud ages ago I can hear that "anomaly" quite clearly, while the vr2.aud that's sitting in the scores.mix that currently comes with PortableRA (and which the CnCNet5 client downloads upon request as well) sounds pretty much like the "clean" track does (at least to my ears). OK, that clears it up then. I also looked through the binaries and found that the strings "MUSIC.INI " and " ShowAllTracks " don't even exist in ra95-spawn.exe . BTW, upon glancing over these musings again I'm inclined to think that what that guy was actually on about was asking why the extended tracks from scores-extra.mix (controlled by music.ini ) won't show in online games. OK, here goes then: While Iran had indeed fixed the Counterstrike track name strings already, there were still some original RA1 and Aftermath ones to correct. Note that when considering the soundtrack CD and Frank Klepacki's website as canon, then the two " Face the Enemy " tracks indeed become reversed in the in-game playlist. This most likely stems from the fact that out of the two, only the game's " Face the Enemy 2[b][/b] " was included on the soundtrack CD, and it was called just " Face the Enemy " there. As the naming on Frank's website primarily orients itself on the official CDs, the other one ended up becoming " Face the Enemy 2 " in the end, even though it had originally been " Face the Enemy [b]1[/b] " in the game. The modified files are attached - while conquer.eng holds the name strings of the first 35 tracks, the added music.ini tacks on the last three tracks (in additon to the eight already put there by Iran's scores-extra.mix package). The only RA1-related track still missing from that playlist would be the map theme, but that one's really way too short and monotonous to even be worth considering to be put there IMHO. ra1_corrected_audio_track_names.zip

Yes, generally speaking the seedings are in need of a serious overhaul. Also, I find it hilarious how Kane's Wrath proper (i.e. the PC version) got eliminated, but the XBOX360 version advanced to the next round... if EA still cared about the series, their marketing execs could use this as an argument for some of the hogwash they like to push (such as, how supposedly console games are vastly superior and the PC as gaming platform should just die).

Following up on the TS:FS music update addon I released earlier this week, here's a similar addon for YR. It foremostly expands the YR playlist with all of the standard RA2 tracks, but also adds in four tracks that were cut from the game (or, in the case of one, just disabled from the playlist) for a complete RA2/YR playlist of 25 tracks. As with the TS:FS addon, this one as well may be of particular interest to people who make gameplay videos with the original game music. Features: - Contrarily to earlier C&C games and their expansions, the in-game playlist in Yuri's Revenge unfortunately does not contain the original Red Alert 2 music. The addon addresses this by adding all RA2 playlist tracks to the YR playlist. - The RA2 track " Jank " (which, despite being a full-length song, is used only as a loading screen theme in RA2) is also added to the playlist. - Three extra tracks (featured on the official RA2 soundtrack CD, but cut from the game itself) are added: " Ready the Army ", " C&C in the House ", and " Probing ". - Track names are corrected to match their names as they appear on the official RA2 soundtrack CD and in Frank Klepacki's RA2/YR music player (most notably restoring " Hell March 2 " 's proper name). - Improved layout of the thememd.ini music control file, along with some tweaking tips (in the readme file). - UPDATE: version 1.00a provides alternate thememd.ini files, allowing to put the YR tracks before the RA2 tracks in the playlist, and/or use the track order from the OST CD and Frank Klepacki's RA2/YR music player instead of the standard in-game order. Also, the readme file has additional tips concerning changing the track order in general. Download v1.00b (SendSpace), 15.4 MiB CRC32: CBF219CD UPDATE: version 1.00b fixes a bug concerning running the batch script as admin (which you shouldn't have to anyway unless your game is installed where it really shouldn't have been) and adds extended checks for presence of required files. (Base game music files theme.mix and thememd.mix are required to be present in the game directory.)

From what I've seen, Iran already mostly took care of the RA1 playlist issues in PortableRA (which arguably is nowadays the most reasonable option to go with for anyone who wants to install RA1), in addition to implementing extended functionality which allows to easily add more tracks via a music.ini file (which he immediately used to add in the RA song remixes from Retaliation/Sole Survivor etc.). He also added redalert.ini flags to always show all tracks and to randomize the starting track. (While the songname fixes seem to have been carried over to the CnCNet5 minimal RA1 version, there apparently are some issues which prevent CnCNet5's custom RA1 spawn exe from using the extra tracks and the mentioned INI flags, thus currently you'll never have a complete track list in CnCNet5 RA1 games. Incidentally I just pointed this problem out here.) Something similar might make sense for RA2/YR, though. Foremostly, unlike TS/FS, YR sadly doesn't include the vanilla RA2 tracks in its playlist. Then there's quite a few tracks that have been cut from the game (even though they are on the official soundtrack CD) and could be added, and there's probably also some small cosmetic track name adjustments to be made (yes, I'm looking at you, "HM2"... given that also a RA2 map was curiously named "Heck Freezes Over", these seem to be hints at a censorship of the word "hell" on EA's part at that time). EDIT: Done.

It appears to me that person used machine translation while making some spelling errors in their original message (the odd non-English words that remain untranslated seem to hint at that), which confused the heck of the translation engine (possibly a poor one in its own right), hence the result ended up being the rather hilarious gibberish that it is. BTW is the thread title original, or was it changed by a mod? Speaking of RA1 music, I noticed that the CnCNet5 RA1 spawn executable seems to ignore both PortableRA's music.ini file (which adds extra music), as well as the ShowAllMusic and RandomStartingSong flags from redalert.ini . No matter how I would set the options, in a multiplayer or skirmish game started via the CnCNet5 client (i.e. from ra95-spawn.exe ) the track that plays upon start is always " Bigfoot ", only side-specific music tracks are visible in the playlist, and the extra tracks from music.ini are never there. Everything works fine when using PortableRA's standard executable ( ra95.exe ) though. EDIT: FunkyFr3sh now enabled all of the above-mentioned functionality in ra95-spawn.exe , thus if (as I suspect) the original poster's concern was the unavailability of the music from scores-extra.mix in CnCNet5 RA1 games, I guess that issue is now resolved.

Here's a small addon I made in an effort to resolve any existing issues with the in-game playlist, as well as to complement it with a few tracks that had been cut from the game. It might be of particular interest to people who make gameplay videos with the original game music, as it effectively adds five audio tracks (for a complete TS:FS playlist of 28 tracks). Features: - A bug exists in TS/FS due to which Nod-specific tracks are available from the in-game playlist only in the Nod campaign, but never in multiplayer or skirmish. The addon works around that by unlocking all tracks, thusly enabling the songs " The Defense ", " Nod Crush " and " Pharotek " in multiplayer/skirmish. - Two extra tracks are added: the early TS track " Stomp " (later featured in C&C: Renegade), and the cut Firestorm track " Initiate ". UPDATE: version 1.01 has adjusted volume levels for these two added tracks. - Track names are corrected to match their names as they appear on the official TS soundtrack CD and in Frank Klepacki's TS/FS music player. - All track length specifications are corrected to show the actual track lengths (some were missing or were just incorrect, while most had been specified incorrectly as minutes/seconds rather than as fractional minutes which are expected). Download v1.01 (SendSpace), 4.08 MiB CRC32: 731ED8E2 (If you currently don't have the base music pack for the CnCNet version of the game, you can download it via the client's " Settings " dialog.)

The client also seems to be quite easily overwhelmed, and one or multiple users hammering away at a button lags the client program to the point where it becomes difficult for other users to adjust their settings properly while the clicking barrage is taking place.

The stuck cursor thing seems to happen specifically if you go back to desktop (be it via Alt-Tab or the Windows key) from the loading screen, and then go back to the game with everyone having loaded and the game actually having started in the meantime. The obvious workaround is simply not to switch back to desktop if everyone seems to be loading fine, and do it only after the game has commenced. BTW the resolution lock of the YR shell is actually doing a disservice here, given that it needlessly first switches from the desktop resolution to 800x600 for the loading screen, and then again to the resolution configured for the game (one annoying result of that is some desktop windows being resized).

AFAIK only EA themselves (or a third party acting strictly on their behalf, such as Strike-Team) can legally employ an algorithm which checks RA2/YR serials for their validity, thus there's really no legal way for an independent third party like CnCNet to do that, even if they wanted to.

I'd also vote for making the "Multi Engineer" option default (while it isn't available via the standard RA2/YR in-game interface, it is available in the CnCNet5 YR client), as it helps prevent cheap engineer rushes. It is a fixed standard in RA1 and is routinely used in TS, so I don't see why it shouldn't be made a default option in RA2 too.