In this post I aim to explain how to get Red alert 2 and Yuri's revenge working on Windows 7

Contents:

1. Running on win 7

2. Lan Play

3. Lan Patch issues

4. Copyprotection

5. Maps

more

If when starting RA2:YR on Windows vista or Windows 7 you are greeted with:

***FATAL*** String Manager Failed to Initialize Properly

In vista the simple trick was to right click and run the game as an administrator. This allowed the game to access the stringmanager dlls.

For me only disabling User account control (UAC) worked. This is because uac is a lot more forceful in windows 7 and won't allow RA2.exe to access the string manager .dll's in the windows directory.

1) Open control panel

2) Click users

3) Click Modify User access control settings.

4) Set the status to "Never notify"

5) Accept the series of warnings.

6) Reboot your machine.

You can now run RA2:YR once your computer reboots.

If this fails to work first time, It might be an idea to enable windows 2000 compatibility mode on every exe in the ra2 folder.

After playing Yuri its recommended you turn UAC back on, Repeat the steps above, setting it back to the default setting:

Lan Play

At the time of Vista, Microsoft had stopped supporting the IPX protocol, which is required by RA2 to perform network play. Luckily some bright sparks managed to hack the games code to make it run on the UDP protocol, which all machines support!

This is dubbed as the lan patch.

There are 2 ways to obtain the lan patch (depending on your boxed copy)

If you have "The first decade" version of Yuri, its easiest if you get the unofficial 1.03 patch. Google "TFD 1.03" or click below.

This allows you to play without the need of the TFD disk (unbelievably useful)!

More importantly, it contains the lan patch, and installs it all for you! It replaces the network dll (wsock.dll) to use UDP instead of IPX.

If you are lucky enough to have the orignal box set, you'll need the stand alone IPX->UDP patch.

Download below, unzip, and place the wsock.dll in the ".../westwood/ra2" folder overwriting the existing wsock.dll.

Download:

However, both methods share the same drawback:

2 modified wsock.dlls cannot talk to eachother in Internet play (lan play is fine however).

If you try, your game will disconnect as soon as you exit the game lobby with a black screen.

A simple fix however:

Rename wsock.dll in the ra2 folder to disable it (i.e wsock.dis)

Then name wsock.dis back (wsock.dll)

Units blow up at the start of the game?

If your units blow up every time you start the game, you have to reinstall.

This is due to the anti piracy switch in the game; If same 2 cd keys see each other (LAN or Internet), as they will trigger the switch causing your units to blow up at the start of every game. I'm not sure if there's a registry key to revert the change without having to reinstall.

But for me a quick reinstall works, or you could download a crack to remove the piracy switch altogether.

Maps

If you ever want to install additional maps, Simply place the map file (.mix) in the ra2 folder:

If you wish to make your own maps for Red Alert 2 Yuri's revenge, a official map editor exists:

Using the map editor, you can create levels for Yuris Revenge and Red alert 2 in both single player and multiplayer.