Command & Conquer Red Alert 1 - Download and play today!

Links
RedAlert1.com - The place to download Red Alert 1 (used in the below article)
iran.cnc-comm.com/ra - Lots of extras to download such as the movies and compaign files

He who controls the past commands the future
I loved Red Alert 1, it was one of the 1st games that I owned on PC.  I had the complete set of Red Alert, Counterstrike and Aftermath for my Birthday.  Before I unwrapped it I thought it was a board game since the box was so huge!

EA released Red Alert 1 as freeware to mark it's 13th Anniversary and released the ISO's for download.

Trouble is as much as I liked the game in 2008 my broadband connection was not great and to download the 2 ISO's required for the complete game I passed up the opportunity and left Red Alert alone.

ReaAlert1.com to the rescue - Here you can download the multiplayer and skirmish only cut down version which was great for me since I have completed the campaigns several times and skirmishes were always my favourite.

On launching the game via the CnCNet launcher and picking Skirmish - wow was I suprised.  The front end for the skirmish (and multiplayer) has been uterly re-done.

As you can see the totally redone interface adds functions to the game not seen until later itereations of the series such as Short Game/MCV Undeploy (Tiberian Sun) and the abilirt to pre-arrange alliances, build off your ally and pick your starting location which did not come in until the Red Alert 2 Expansion: Yuri's Revenge.  There are also a couple of interesting fixes as well.

The Settings Button > Game Settings Tab includes a neat button to quickly install the Music which is a great bonus but is kept separeate to keep the game download small (80+MB for music)

In Addition clicking the Config button on this screen which has yet more tabs - yes the settings screen could do with some refinement!  But in the video options tab you can pick much higher resolutions than the original game would allow, pick to play in a window and generally ticker with a plethora of options!  Be mindfull though if I set the resolution too high the game did not display correctly - I think it is best to stick with the default options available (max res 1024x768)

Once you have the options configured how you like the you then you are free to enjoy this great game!  Now in higher resolution, with refined skirmish and online match settings!

He who commands the future conquers the past

Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun on Linux for free

Instructions
You may or may not be aware that EA Games have released C&C, C&C Red Alert and Tiberian Sun as freeware.

This will show you the quickest and easiest way to play a fully patched Tiberian Sun with IP networking enabled to allow you to play LAN games with others even without the old IPX networking components configured (basically anything later than Windows XP I think).
 *Note: You must install wine in order for the instructions below.  On debian based distros this is as simple as typing in:

sudo apt-get install wine

Install Wine to play Tiberian Sun in Linux

You should then be prompted firstly for your password and secondly a Y/N prompt - naturally you will want to press Y and wine will be downloaded and installed as above.

Step 1.
Go to this cnc-comm.com this is an amazing site that has all of the downloads you could ever need for Command and Conquer as well as hosting some awesome mods/map editors etc.
More specifically for Tiberian Sun goto the TS: Download page then click the rather small Download button to start the download.

Step 2.
 Once the TSInstaller.exe has downloaded run it - hopefully Wine is the default application for .exe files so you should be able to double click on it.  Otherwise open a terminal and cd to your Downloads directory and run

wine TSInstall.exe

Setup C&C Tiberian Sun using Wine

Either way you will end up with the Tiberian sun installer running.  I would choose the default options for everything except to remove the LAN patch if playing online and skip downloading movies unless you are going to play offline.

Step 3.
Run the game! (it should be in your gnome menu under "other")