The Kingdom of Philtopia

Think back to 1995 and the birth of one of the greatest real time strategies of all time, Command & Conquer. Back in those days the game was DOS based and the units were larger than life with a dual disc story to tell the tales of both factions. This game along with Command and Conquer Red alert are still my favorite games of the RTS genre to this date but time has not been kind to their multiplayer aspects. When Windows XP came along all of a sudden both games became un runable due to their dependance on kernel level IPX support. This left the game unrunnable until a patch that disables multiplayer was released isolating the game forever except on Westwoods system which was limited to 1v1.

But wait there’s more.

EA since it has announced the new C&C has been slowly releasing all the old classics as freeware. Currently that list includes C&C, C&C red alert and C&C: Tiberian Sun. For me this doesn’t matter because I bought the first decade special edition with C&C 3 two years go but this does mean that any fan patches and bundles made are now legit for distrobution which is the point I am slowly getting to.

Player made Patch 1.06

This patch improves the games resolution from 640×480 to 1024×768 which everything still looks pretty good in but the better part is that the IPX networking has been converted to UDP. That’s right, LAN play is back with a vengeance and with the CnCnet tool you can play up to 6 player matches over the internet. The people responsible for this patch have also been kind enough to provide a 99meg game package with their patch that is fully playable minus videos so join me in reliving a classic.

Related links:
Freeware Command and Conquer site
CnC 1.06 patch and bundles
CnCnet tool for internet play