C&C Red Alert 1

IIRC EA freewared the original version, but it wont' run well under modern OSes. Nor does it seem I can find the link again.

edit: here ya are: http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/54508 that article has links to the 2 disks.

the free release is the patched version they made for The First Decade, but I don't know if they made a new installer or not if they didn't it will not install on a 64bit OS, the game is 32bit but the installer is 16bit for the original release

I would recommend just buying The First Decade if you are a fan of the C&C series.

But for multiplayer (LAN) anyway, you'll need to patch the game to go through UDP instead of IPX.

If you're interested here: http://www.understorm.net/

actully go to commandandpatch.com

Afaik you have 3 choices.

1) Buy C&C First Decade (and ofc that will cost you) since it's installer has no problem running on Vista or Win7.

2) Use a little tool called Red Alert Manager which you can find here (scroll down). What it does is it patches the exec so that it can be run under Vista (I've successfully used it to install the game some months ago on Win7 RTM so it should work with a retail Win7)

3) Manually trick the installer into thinking you're running Windows95.
To do this you need to run the setup exe directly from the disc in Win95 compat mode (don't use the autorun). Then to play the game you just have to use the XP Compatibility Patch made by EA. You can find this one here.
Then just play the game in XP compat mode.

Hope this helps.