A couple of months back, Electronic Arts did something uncharacteristically benevolent and released several of the old Command and Conquer games under the GPLv3. Logically, we knew that opened the doors up to the games being ported to new operating systems and architectures, but we admit that it was still a little surprising to see Command and Conquer: Red Alert running on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2.
[Charlie Birks] documented the process of getting the 1996 game up and running on the microcontroller in a series of Mastodon posts spanning a few days in March. Seeing the incremental progress made each day makes for interesting reading, as he moves from the game just barely starting up to being able to complete missions and eventually even get multiplayer going between two Picos.
As [Charlie] clarifies, he’s technically using the Pimoroni Pico Plus 2 W, which takes the RP2350B from the official Pico 2, adds 8 MB of PSRAM, and bumps the onboard flash to 16 MB. The upgraded specs and an SD card are required to get the game running, as content that would have originally been held in RAM on the computer must instead be pulled from flash.
For an even more streamlined experience, he eventually slaps the Pico Plus 2 W into the Pimoroni Pico VGA Demo Base — which provided not only an integrated SD card slot, but (as the name implies) VGA output.
It’s still early days, but [Charlie] has been pushing all of his code changes into his fork of Red Alert on GitHub for anyone who wants to play along at home. If you get his fork compiled and running on your own Pico, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.
It’d be great to have this game on a handheld form factor with touch-LCD. A dedicated device to play just 1 game sounds a little extra but sometimes that’s just what I’d love to have right now.
That’s what I thought right when I seen the waveshare display.
With prices for displays and MCUs right now it would still be a steal.
Awesome. Source code recently got release. I want to port it to STM32.
Did they open RA2 too ? If so, there’s a chance we could play it without waiting openRA to implement it (2050 ?)
I think RA2 sourcecode got lost.
I think they’re intentionally not sharing RA2 and TS’s sourcecode to do a remaster, like they did with RA1 and TD. You may call me delusional for dreaming, but I gotta hold out hope for something good in this world, and it’s Red Alert 2 remastered.
I had a non-W Pico Plus 2 in the VGA board (so ended up hacking the null modem code back to life).
Anyway, I could point at some of my other posts on the subject, or I could mention that there’s a fork with DVI output: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:q7e4ze54wjwr2z52ywkxw7bj/post/3llhftgdr2k25
That would be great! I miss the old command and conquer games. It would be really great if they could add red alchemist in there to mod the game. I used to give the attack dogs the tesla zap. So they would electrocute the infantry then instantly teleport to them to do the dog bite while they are on fire. It was great. Two or three could clear out dozens of infantry very fast. Oh and give the mammoth tanks the stealth ability.