Game Content

Automatic installation (recommended)

OpenRA will prompt you to install the original game content the first time that you launch a mod. This process occurs automatically from inside the game: the game client can download a minimal set of game files from the internet, or copy the full game content (including music and movies) from an original install cd.

---

On the first run the game will ask whether you want to download a stripped down version automatically as both the full motion video 🎬 and music soundtrack 🎼 are optional. For a wholesome multimedia experience you should copy the complete *.MIX content from the original game CD. Red Alert and Tiberian Dawn have been released by EA Games as freeware. You can download the 💿 CD-Images:

• CNCNZ.com: Freeware Classic Command & Conquer Games

• EA.com: Download Red Alert for free!

• ppmsite.com RA95 mirror

• ModDB.com: C&C: Gold Full Game

• Baxxster's C&C Gold Mirror (NOD and GDI)

• ppmsite.com C&C Gold mirror

Please keep in mind that the CD extracting algorithm is hard-coded to those CD-Images. Localized installation CDs and expansion packs will not work.

Note for users of 64-bit Windows: The original RA installer is 16-bit and so won't run on 64-bit operating systems. This can be worked around by using the Red Alert Setup Manager. Make sure you apply the no-CD protection fix so all the files needed are installed to the hard drive.

There are various other distributions of Red Alert already where you can also grab the content from:

• PortableRA
• Red Alert 1 Installer
• Red Alert 1 bundled with CnCNet

Same goes for Command & Conquer Tiberian Dawn:

• Command & Conquer Gold: Project 1.06
• Command & Conquer Gold: Media Packs
• Command & Conquer Gold - Patched Installer for Windows 7, 8

Manual installation

Content folder location

If you would like to install the game files manually then you need to navigate to the following directory

• Windows: %USERPROFILE%\My Documents\OpenRA\Content\
• Mac OSX: ~/Library/Application Support/OpenRA/Content/
• Linux: ~/.openra/Content/
• For portable installations: Support\Content\ inside your OpenRA installation folder (create the folders if necessary)

and then open the folder of the mod you want to install content to:

• ra for Red Alert
• cnc for Tiberian Dawn
• d2k for Dune 2000

Important

• Linux is case-sensitive, so you have to change the .MIX extension to .mix.
• Due to content installer overhaul in the version release-20161019 you need to further navigate into a directory called v2 when installing content for the Red Alert or Dune 2000 mods. So the game content directory you need to use effectively gets OpenRA\Content\ra\v2 or OpenRA\Content\d2k\v2 respectively.

You can now copy the mix files into the game contented directory you navigated to.

Installing the full-motion videos

The FMVs take up most of the space on the original game media (~500MB each), so they are not included in the downloaded game assets. They can easily be added if you have the original media, though.

Tiberian Dawn

The installation of the movie files is quite straight-forward here. You need both the GDI and Nod disc for the installation, as each contains a different set of movies.

1. Insert the GDI disc.
2. Extract the contents of the MOVIES.MIX file from the CD to the cnc game content directory and put them into a folder called movies (Note: This folder must be named lower case!).
3. Insert the Nod disc.
4. Extract the contents of the MOVIES.MIX file and copy them into the movies folder as well.

Red Alert

The steps here are a bit more involved, as the .MIX files we are interested in are actually contained in yet other .MIX files. So we have to extract them first. Here, too, you need both the Soviet and Allied disc.

1. Insert the Allied disc.
2. Extract the movies1.mix file from the MAIN.MIX file from the CD.
3. Extract all contents of the movies1.mix file into a folder called movies (Note: This folder must be named lower case!).
4. Insert the Soviet disc.
5. Extract the movies2.mix file from the MAIN.MIX file from the CD.
6. Extract all contents of the movies2.mix file into the movies folder.

Dune 2000

This will only work correctly for the assets from the English version of the game (files from other versions need to be renamed, see the 3rd step), as the files are named differently for other languages.

1. Insert the Dune 2000 disc.
2. Move the contents of the movies directory on the CD into the Movies (note: upper-case!) subdirectory of the d2k game content directory.
3. Optionally: if you have a non-English version of the game, you have to rename the movie files to match their English counterparts, so for example from a_br01_g.vqa ('g' for German) to a_br01_e.vqa ('e' for English).