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Pi Pico 2 Now Supports Command & Conquer Emulation

Old Command and Conquer games, once owned by Electronic Arts, were unexpectedly made available under the GPLv3 license a few months ago. This move logically paved the way for modifications and distribution of these classic games.

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Old Command and Conquer games, initially owned by Electronic Arts, were made freely available under...
Old Command and Conquer games, initially owned by Electronic Arts, were made freely available under the terms of GPLv3. Consequently, their open-source release allowed for modifications and adaptations.

Pi Pico 2 Now Supports Command & Conquer Emulation

The Unexpected Journey of Command and Conquer: Red Alert on a Microcontroller

In a surprising twist, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 has recently become a surprising host for the 1996 classic game, Command and Conquer: Red Alert. Charlie Birks, a keen enthusiast, chronicled the process of getting the game running on the microcontroller in a captivating series of Mastodon posts.

Every day, he documented his incremental progress from the game barely starting up to completing missions and even managing multiplayer between two Raspberry Pi Pico 2s. The journey makes for an exciting read, as it showcases the determination and ingenuity needed to bring a game from the PC era to such a compact device.

[Charlie Birks] uses the Pimoroni Pico Plus 2 W, which enhances the RP2350B from the official Pico 2 by adding 8 MB of PSRAM and increasing the onboard flash to 16 MB. An SD card is also required for the game to function, as the content originally stored in RAM on a computer now needs to be pulled from flash storage.

[Charlie Birks] shares his code changes on hisGitHub fork of the game, making it accessible for anyone who wishes to replicate or build upon his work. If you successfully get the game running on your own Pico, we'd love to hear about your experience in the comments!

Porting a game like Command and Conquer: Red Alert to low-resource platforms is a complex endeavor, involving several key steps. Here's a general guide:

  1. Access to the game's source code is essential. While the source code for Red Alert is not officially open-source, parts of the code may be accessible.
  2. A compiler and build system that generate code for the target microcontroller (e.g., GCC for ARM-based systems) are crucial. In the case of the Raspberry Pi Pico 2, you'll be working with the RP2040 microcontroller.
  3. Optimization and compatibility of the game's code are essential for low-resource hardware. This may involve rewriting, modifying, and fine-tuning sections of the code for better performance and ensuring compatibility with the Raspberry Pi Pico 2's resources.
  4. Adapting or replacing libraries used by the game is necessary to work with the new hardware. This could include graphics rendering, audio processing, and input handling.

Community projects and forums can provide valuable insights and code snippets for porting games to small devices. Open-source projects like OpenC2 (a reimplementation of the original Red Alert game) could serve as a starting point for porting efforts. Websites like Hackaday offer articles with projects where enthusiasts have successfully run complex software on low-resource devices, potentially providing inspiration or code snippets for similar projects.

  1. In the spirit of Charlie Birks' achievement, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2, a gadget of modern technology, has proven to be a viable platform for hosting classic games, such as Command and Conquer: Red Alert.
  2. As the porting process of games like Red Alert to low-resource platforms like the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 involves technology-driven tasks, such as code optimization, library adaptation, and the utilization of compilers and build systems, it necessitates a deep understanding of various gadgets and their functionalities.

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