Playing Red Alert on LAN

Question

Is it possible to play the original Red Alert on LAN? I've looked up various ways, although I was never able to figure it out.

Answer 1

In order to play older games, like Red Alert, via LAN connections on newer operating systems you'll need to emulate IPX connections between the machines. There are a few ways to accomplish this.

For DOS games you're in luck as DosBox comes with this support natively. Simply start the ipx server on one machine ipxnet startserver [UDP port] and then connect to it on the rest of the machines ipxnet connect <IP> [UDP port]

For Windows based games you can use something like Kali which will give you a fairly robust interface, or something like ipxemu or ipxwrapper which will trick the games into thinking they are connected via IPX.

Answer 2

Yes, it is possible according to the manual and the hundreds of hours I spent playing it. Note that early Red Alert (and Command & Conquer) games need the IPX-protocol to play multiplayer games, which isn't supported by many current operating systems.