For some reason, already having downloaded Command and Conquer and the follow-up, C&C: Red Alert [free download], I thought I’d check out on my new laptop if there were any special Christmas freebies from EA this year. It turns out there weren’t, but that they have subsequently released the third C&C game (Tiberian Sun) as a free download so I went ahead and downloaded it.
Of course once I’d done that and spent hours trying to make it work, I realised the download wasn’t compatible with my shiny new laptop because it’s running Windows 7, and Windows 7 doesn’t like old games or something. Even when I tried following the instructions, it ran (which was more than I’d managed to get it to do myself) but when the main menu loaded, none of the menus would display properly. Fail!
Enter CnCsector.net, who have packaged the game up into a nice installer package that they assure us works with Windows 7 (including Win7 64-bit!). It took 4-5 hours to download all the files (and there doesn’t seem to be any way to skip this – not good!)… though 99% of that is for the movie files for the cut-scenes, which are optional.
Sadly, the same thing happened again – I never did get it working entirely properly, though I did find a semi-solution. Firstly I noticed that if I hit the Windows key to go back to Windows, then opened the game again the menu was there on screen. Actually I noticed this when I tried to find out if the menu showed up if I did a Print Screen (it did), but the menu was there when I came back.
Solution
Some while later I noticed that if I put the mouse cursor over where the menu should be and scrolled (e.g. using the scroll wheel, or the side of the laptop trackpad), it would appear (without exiting to Windows). It’s not ideal but it’ll do me for now. Thanks to all the guys at CnC Comm who tried to help.