@dietmarea Well, these three definitely do, though in Tiberian Dawn I still had to fiddle with the compatibility settings to get it working right. Strangely, I had to disable the "Run As Admin" option before it ran, despite the Win95 compatibility mode I used causing the elevation prompt anyway. I should probably look deeper into all that some day, and update my patch.
Overall, pretty much all pre-C&C3 games will have some problems running out of the box, but all of them can generally be resolved with some manual tweaking and fan-patches. Each of them has different issues, though. To sum up what I know on getting The Ultimate Collection running:
- All games have issues with the Origin In Game feature. Disable it. The sticky threads explain that.
- If you use fan-made patches, disable auto-update in Origin, because it'll reset any files that don't match the originals.
- Most of the later games (post-RA2) will run best in WinXP Service Pack 3 mode.
- All pre-C&C3 games will require admin rights to run, since they are from an age before programs installed in a write-protected Program Files folder, and thus they often keep their settings files inside the game install folder.
- Some stuff like running mods, starting in windowed mode etc don't work because Origin doesn't pass on all required command line parameters to the games. To fix that, download and install Bibber's fixed launchers.
Besides that... Command & Conquer 1, Red Alert 1 and Tiberian Sun have all been upgraded with community-created unofficial patches that fix a lot of their bugs and compatibility problems. For Red Alert 2 there's a more general patch that solves a lot of its graphics problems. You can find them here:
Command & Conquer 1:
Red Alert 1:
Tiberian Sun:
Red Alert 2:
- The graphics system patch DDWrapper is known to solve the "black screen" issue.
Download the zip file and extract "ddraw.dll" and "aqrit.cfg" into your game folder. Then, open the configuration file "aqrit.cfg" in Notepad, change the "ForceDirectDrawEmulation" option to 1, save the file, and the game should work.
- Other issues with the menus not showing correctly can either be related to Windows' display scaling (which is in the file compatibility settings in Win10), or can be fixed by specifically disabling the VideoBackBuffer option in the [Video] section of the game's ini configuration file.
C&C Generals / Zero Hour:
- These games are known to malfunction when their settings files in the My Documents folder aren't created as they should be, or they have a resolution set that modern monitors don't support. Imloudy posted a guide to fix that here. If the mentioned folders don't exist, simply create them.
- Their Origin-specific executables don't seem to be set to run in compatibility mode, despite requiring it too. If you start the game and the background on the main menu is a still image rather than an animated game sequence, make sure to find "generals-origin.exe" in both the Generals and Zero Hour folders, and set them to run as admin and in WinXP SP3 compatibility mode.
Do expect to be fiddling with compatibility modes and settings files for all of these. These are old games, and they definitely need a bunch of tweaking to get them working right.
The later games generally don't have too many problems I think. There was some nasty crash C&C3 has on Intel HD graphics, but apparently that wasn't Win10 related but driver related, and it has apparently been fixed by more recent driver updates.
Like a lot of people helping out around this place, I am a volunteer, not an EA employee. I'm just here to help. If my answer helped you, please give XP. And if an answer solved your problem, be sure to accept it as solution.
I will not help with game questions sent as private messages; those questions belong on the boards where everyone can see my answers.
