Red Alert 2 keeps crashing after playing for a few minutes

Question

I had downloaded Red Alert 2 with Yuri's Revenge, and have been going through several cycles of playing it and having to restart, because it would randomly freeze a few minutes into a skirmish.

Is there any way to fix this?

Answer 1

Download ddwrapper, unzip, and place ddraw.dll and aqrit.cfg in your red alert 2 directory. These steps I got from the page linked and pasted below

The steps I found elsewhere to prevent random crashing is to go into aqrit.cfg and change SingleProcAffinity to a value of 1. This apparently prevents the game from using more than 1 processor which might be causing the crash (I'm not sure, this is secondhand info).

Here's the source of some of my steps at this page but pasting it here in case it dies

Handling Red Alert 2 and Yuri’s Revenge on Windows 8 / 8.1 / 10 / 11

Updated 29 April 2019 Windows 8, 8.1, 10 and 11 require additional steps to get C&C: Red Alert 2 and Yuri’s Revenge running. The latest procedure involves simply installing the latest version of the CnCNet YR client which will even patch the regular Red Alert 2 and Yuri’s Revenge gameplay even if you are not using the client itself. If needed, you can use the client’s options menu to change the renderer if you face any further graphical issues.

Legacy solution One option is to move ts-ddraw or DDrawCompat to the Red Alert 2 directory OR place ddwrapper there and apply the C&C Graphics Patcher to executables of both Red Alert 2 and Yuri’s Revenge. Should that fail, the other option is to apply XWIS’ fix for Red Alert 2 and fix for Yuri’s Revenge – however, this will make the games incompatible with Ares-powered mods (like Mental Omega APYR) and probably CnCNet.

Answer 2

The best option, in 2023+, is to download CnCNet and install it in the Red Alert 2 / Yuri's Revenge directory.

Configuring CnCNet to run the game

Open the CnCNet client, and get all of your video options tuned to your liking. For the renderer, there's a 99% chance you'll want to use CnC-DDraw or TS-DDraw. You can play in your monitor's native resolution, but keep in mind that the zoom level is tied to the resolution, so playing at even 1080p will be very zoomed out. Here are the settings I use to get a 4:3, reasonably-zoomed resolution, that utilizes my full monitor height.

In addition I set the renderer to use windowed via cnc-ddraw config.exe in the game directory.

Then inside of ddraw.ini I set

[ddraw]
; ### Optional settings ###
; Use the following settings to adjust the look and feel to your liking
; Stretch to custom resolution, 0 = defaults to the size game requests
width=1866
height=1400
; Window position, -32000 = center to screen
posX=-32000
posY=0

to stretch the 4:3 1024x768 resolution to use the full vertical height of my 1440p monitor, minus the Windows 10 taskbar. You can use full-screen and have the blackbars, but I recommend windowed mode if you plan to alt-tab a lot. Alt-tabbing is better with the CnCNet fixes, but crashes still happen, and full-screening such a small window can mess up your desktop icon positioning.

You'll get a pretty faithful experience to playing Red Alert 2 in 2001 if you use the settings that I have shown.

Running the game

Skirmish and online multiplayer

For skirmish and online multiplayer, you can just launch the game via the CnCNet client.

Note: saved games for Skirmish games will need to be loaded via the vanilla launcher, or by starting a new skirmish, pausing, and clicking load save.

Campaign

As of version 8.49.0 of CnCNet, you can click the Campaign button in the CnCNet Client, which will open the vanilla main menus for Red Alert 2 or Yuri's Revenge. You can launch the campaign, or load a campaign save, via the vanilla menu.

The menus will likely not use the full window, but the gameplay and videos will correctly use the full window.

Note: Game speed is tied to your FPS, and the speed "fastest" is uncapped and will run the game as fast as your computer can run RA2. I highly recommend setting your max FPS to be 60, or the AI will beat you in five seconds on "fastest."