C&C: Red Alert in Windows 7 or Vista

Command and Conquer: Red Alert is an old game made by Blizzard approx 1996, and was recently released free to public. You can find it all over the net. Being an old game, it was not designed for todays multi-gigahertz, multi-core, NT6/7 technology, and this causes huge problems for the mouse scrolling.

What is a problem is that the mouse scrolling algorithm used in this game has some assumptions on how fast your processor is, and it is quite safe to say that those assumptions no longer hold as the scrolling speed is blindingly fast. There is a fix for this, although not very elegant, and that is to make your cpu super slow by making another program drain all of its power. CPUGRAB is one such program, and can be found all over the net. It can make your super fast core i7 behave like a 486 in notime

The only problem with this is that todays cpus have more than one core to split the load, which in our case is sub-optimal. You therefore have to assign both Red Alert and CPUGRAB to the same core using either

1. The Task Manager (press Ctrl-Alt-Shift)->Processes->Chosose CPUGRAB->Set affinity->CPU CORE 0
2. or doing it slightly faster from the command line (here assuming cpugrab.exe is in your Windows folder): Choose “Run …” and type cmd.exe /c start /affinity 1 cpugrab.exe

Since RA by default is running on core 0 you now have both programs running on the same core and can adjust cpugrab to a setting that makes the program comfortable. On my Core 2 Duo T7200 I set CPUGRAB to use 90% of the available cpu power.