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Comment by 999900000999 | Hacker News Reader

Open RA2 also exists. I think RA2 is significantly better and the peak of what an RTS can be.

Say what you want about EA, but they not only tolerated Open RA, but they straight up opened sourced the older games.

More publishers need to do this. I wouldn’t even mind a crowdfunding effort( give the proceeds to charity) to release the source for other games.

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RA2 is still available on Steam, and despite its age runs with only minimal issues on Windows 11. It works on Linux too, but it works a lot better if you add the cnc-ddraw DLL and change the launch options to:

  WINEDLLOVERRIDES="ddraw=n,b" %command%

>Say what you want about EA, but they not only tolerated Open RA

They also don't have a choice though. There's nothing illegal or actionable about OpenRA. At most EA could have potentially forced them not to refer to CnC on the github, but even then its not clear that that's enforceable

They could still send out cease and desist letters. GitHub doesn’t have the best track record standing up to those.

Sure but then it'd just be hosted somewhere else

What's wrong with letting EA be the good guy here.

They definitely didn't need to open source it.

I must have paid for a various copies of RA2 5 times over the years. I imagine they got enough monitization from those old titles.

I would pay inflation adjusted original retail for a GOG DRM-free version of RA2.

> inflation adjusted original retail

It would be more expensive than AAA games then.

> Open RA2 also exists

Does it? I couldn't find anything like that.

I turned up the following in my searching:

https://cncnet.org/red-alert-2

https://github.com/OpenRA/ra2

Kirov reporting!

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