[COMMAND AND CONQUER FOR WINDOWS.95-CLS CPY
Eliora Shopbell
You can try to merge the 2 mix files together - they are simple containers (custom Westwood format) with files inside. I don't think the CD Audio portion of the Covert Ops CD is used in-game - AFAIK it's just a bonus like on the Counterstrike and Aftermath CDs. Do you have the C&C: The First Decade DVD? Because the C&C and Covert Ops from that compilation run on Windows without the DVD in driver, so maybe you can use it as a base for your DOS version.
Nope, I've only got that disks. I bought Command & Conquer for Windows 95 when I had a DX2/66, and exchanged it for the DOS version after discovering that it didn't work on my computer (I don't remember if it had some incompatibilities with my Trident 9400CXi, or it was awfuly slow, or it didn't work on 8 megs). The release has english language and DOS only executables. I guess that The Covert Operations (being a patch over C&C) have both DOS and Windows binaries, but I haven't tested it on Windows 95.
If you can get those files I guess you can play freely (because the EULA will allow you to do so). But you should be unable to obtain those files because EA shut down the page that contained it. It's a strange situation, because other sites distributing those files (unless they have been permission to) are involved in piracy... because they're distributing some files EA was giving away for free.
I don't know if the files on my DVD are exactly the same freeware files, but I suspect that Micromana obtained permission to distribute the free games from EA (and that's the reason to include only the first three games into the DVD, and leaving apart The Covert Operations that was not released as freeware).
As far as I've been able to determine, DOS C&C fails on scores.mix because the file is a .mix archive that starts with "sc", just like the addon mixfiles read by the game as part of the updates system introduced for easily adding the Covert Ops files (in v1.18p, if I remember correctly).
Basically, this means that the file gets processed in the addon files reading system, and when the game later tries to read it again as "file to read from CD" from the same location, the file cannot be accessed because it already has a pointer open in it... or something like that.
There are two solutions for this. One, which is the simplest but least efficient since it'll make the game start up slower, is simply to rename scores.mix to something else, like "scores2.mix", so only the sc*.mix addon system will read it, and the attempt to read scores.mix itself will fail gracefully. I think the reason this is slower is because hard disk files somehow get opened more thoroughly than the quick-access-read CD files.
The better way, however, is related to the -cd command line parameter. The parameter is basically "-cd[path to act as CD]" (actually it's more advanced; it accepts a semicolon-separated list of paths). This means the whole trouble can be avoided simply by making a subfolder for the media, and putting everything in there, and then just adapting the -cd parameter accordingly (e.g. "-cdmedia"; it works on relative paths too.); it only reads the sc*.mix files from the game's root folder.
The full scores.mix (the version from the Covert Ops, that is, which has the expansion tracks), and the full merged movies.mix (with all videos from both sides, and all common ones) can be found in the media folder, as cnc1_music_full.rar and cnc1_movies_full.rar
PS: My account ("Nyerguds") is apparently "inactive". It said to "contact a board administrator" about it, which, as far as I can see, is completely impossible without actually already having an account; no contact information is available publicly anywhere at all on the site. To complicate matters, I'm fairly sure the other account is registered on an ancient and long-dead email address, so password recovery is a no-go too. Anyone know who I'd have to contact about getting it back?
- DOSBox offers better compatibility than the "pure" Windows game. At least a patch (and some compatibility options fiddling) are needed to run it on modern OS. Also, there are some problems to run multiplayer games with C&C 95 versions.
A lot of the crash problems C&C95 had weren't compatibility-related anyway, but were bugs that are also in the DOS version, but simply don't crash there. They crash on Windows now because modern windows OSes happen to have tighter memory management than DOS/Win95/98 had. But the bugs themselves were always there. My patch actually fixes them.
Well, that's debatable. Sure, they contain less files, but none of these files are normally used by the game anyway, unless you know some hidden switches in conquer.ini to activate them (like Scores=Remix). Basically they just cleaned them up.
i made iso files and a batch to choose at start:
You can switch between the mounted isos by pressing CTRL+F4 ingame.
Haven't tried to mount all 3 Isos to different drive letters, maybe that works as well.
Nyerguds
If I replaced the standard movies.mix with your merged one is the game smart enough to play the correct cut scene?
At the moment I have to copy over the GDI or NOD one depending on which side I'm playing.
The simplest way to do it is to put all the media in your game folder except scores.mix. You can either put that in a different folder and use -cdfolderpath to refer to it, or place it in the game folder but rename it to something else starting with "sc", like scores2.mix, to make the game read it as addon just like the sc-???.mix files.
By the way, -cd accepts relative paths, so if you want to use a CD folder, you can just make it use a subfolder in your game folder and paste its name directly behind the -cd parameter. So for a folder called GAMEDISC you can just start the game as "C&C -CDGAMEDISC"
If I replaced the standard movies.mix with your merged one is the game smart enough to play the correct cut scene?
At the moment I have to copy over the GDI or NOD one depending on which side I'm playing.
Actually, the game is dumb enough to play the correct cutscene. Once you're either in no-cd mode, or the mix file is in the game folder, the game doesn't care where it comes from, only what it contains. Mix files have no special properties; they are simply file archives, like zip files or something (only not compressed). The videos were just separated into 2 archives to fit on the 2 CDs. Since the format is fully known, it wasn't hard to just make one containing all videos (including the 6 new ones of the Covert Ops disk, btw). The game doesn't care; it just reads the mix archive and looks for the file it needs.
On the subject of scores... there's a bunch of hidden options in the game, including one that unlocks the special remixes, but sadly, it seems they disabled/broke that option in v1.22 (no clue why). There's 2 tools available that can do the same thing with some small byte hacks in the exe, though. You can read everything about them on this page.
Ahh cool, haven't messed round with mix files since the 90's. Was worried they gave it simple names, e.g. mission1, mission2, etc but thinking about it now that would of meant cut scenes would of still played no matter which side I played, just the wrong one.
Even better news about the scores! There was a way you could extract them I think and play them in the game, but haven't bothered with that for years so don't really remember and then your patch came along. But now I can listen to C&C 80's while playing on my original 486, just like I did back in the mid 90's! Thanks again!
The alternates are in fact the originals; apparently Quality Control thought the many voices used in these tracks (which occasionally include the EVA voice) would be confusing to the players, and that's why they put in voice-stripped ones instead. However, the PSX and Sega Saturn versions of the game (and the soundtrack CD, for that matter) have the original tracks, and even include a couple which were not added as .var file in the PC version. My C&C95 patch adds all of those too.
Of course, I went a lot further in my C&C95 patch; I actually added an extra setting to the music information to specify the correct playlist length for the alternates. These lengths aren't calculated from the file but just stored internally, and since the alternates' lengths are rarely identical to the normal ones, they're obviously wrong once you replace the tracks, even through the original hidden options.
(In fact, in C&C95, I made those settings editable from an ini file; the start of a full ini rules project to un-hardcode all internal game data that sadly never really went anywhere. The music was my proof of concept ? )
The general.mix files of the two CDs are different; that's the archive containing the missions, and besides mission 1, they only contain the missions of that CD's side. So these need to be combined or extracted to work right, or the -cd stuff needs to be set up so you have a specific launcher for GDI and for Nod, each loading a folder with its own correct general.mix file.
Apologies for necro-posting on this one, but just in case it's useful for others - this being the first thread that showed up for me and a solution to my problem after a few days thought. I wanted to run original Command & Conquer on my 486 but was having some problems. During install from my original discs in the computers cdrom I was having problems, the EVA setup programme would crash during sound setup: it would autodetect my Create CT2290 ok, but where it wants to test the sound and save settings it would crash. If I set as 'no digitised sound' it would allow me to install. I tried doing an install on another machine copying the conquer.ini to copy the sound settings etc. but then my PC would have trouble reading the disc expecting maybe a different drive letter. Eventually I got that working but again without sound, if I manually changed the conquer.ini for my soundcard details again the game would crash, sometimes showing some fatally skippy starting video. I think the cause of this was that my cdrom drive is plugged into the IDE socket on the soundcard (as my 486 only has one dual IDE channel which using for two CF drives, so my cdrom goes into the soundcard) works very well elsewhere but must be too much with sound and video streaming from the cdrom. On a different PC a Pentium managed to copy the .mix files, a unified video and general.mix into media sub-dir and got it working well without needing the original CDs using 'c&C -cdmedia' - then suddenly thought it might fix the 486 issue too - and it has. On the 486 I left off the movies mix to save a bit of hard drive space, but now sound is working great and totally playable, all without the cdrom. Thanks for the hints from 2016!
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