I love playing games and making tools for Command & Conquer. This account mainly serves as a secondary archive of my stuff; but anyone is free to use my tools/mods/etc. If you have any suggestions or comments about my work, ask away; I'll happily reply back. My main project page is the link for my Homepage. Creator of the *new* fixed launchers for C&C: The Ultimate Collection

Report RSS Introductions + Fixed Launchers v1.00 Release

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Well, seeing as this is my first post on here as well as my first release of a project on this site, I think a matter of introductions are in order.

As you may already know, my name is Medstar; I'm a new-ish tool maker for the Command and Conquer games, I'm a self taught programmer in Python, AutoIT, and the programming language used with NSIS-compiled installers (that PHP/assembly mix they use), I am a Sci-Fi enthusiast (Star Wars, Halo, etc.), and I'm currently learning a bit of reverse-engineering in the background for several games' file archives.

I'm generally an easy-going type of guy both online and IRL, and I'm pretty open on various conversational subjects--meaning I'm not one to badmouth you right back if you critique my stuff/share a questionable opinion on something; I try to be very formal and respectful of one's opinion by taking it non-personally, and I will happily return my own opinion in the conversation.

I...tend not to go on social media for a variety of reasons; most namely that I have my own life to worry about, and I don't like sharing every moment of my life with the public. If I do use it, it's mainly to connect with friends I no longer see on a daily basis. However, simple questions about my life are fine if asked--I'll happily reply to such comments either here or in PM's on Discord.

In short: if you want to talk to me, it's best to do it here or on Discord. Don't think you're talking to me if you find someone with my name on any social media app, because it's very likely that you're talking to some rando on there.


Now...the fixed launchers...

Version v1.00; hot damn, I can't believe it's finally done! Making the new fixed launchers for those using The Ultimate Collection was actually what got me into the whole tool-making process for Command and Conquer. I saw the need occur when Bibber sadly took his site offline, leaving those not knowing what's going on to squander around for any stray link with the hopes of it being a legit copy of the v1.20 launchers. I was one of the lucky ones who grabbed a copy of them from CNCNZ before they were purged from there as well.

With these in hand, I decided to take a look at what all the launchers actually change/add. And no, I didn't peek into their source code or anything like that (not that I could)--what I assume they do is based on what I can see on the average user perspective. It's all assumptions on my part; heck, they could be doing something else entirely in the background aside from what I could see.

After closer examination, I concluded that the .par files for each executable were being patched as to not need Origin to launch alongside the game, the GAMELauncher.exe files were swapped out with ones Bibber himself made, and the other exe's were either left alone or replaced with No-CD patched variants from either a disk or from The First Decade--awesome. So, the .par files and the No-CD exe's were easy to hunt down and manage; all that was left was to make my own GAMELauncher.exe's.

With Python being an interpreter language, I knew that if I were to make the new launchers with that language, the resulting exe's would be very large. So, I dug around and came across AutoIT, which made use of the Windows API's and all of that fancy stuff. So, with a few tutorials and helpful code snippets, I made some rather slim and fine-tuned templates to use for each launcher--one for those with GUI's (the window that pops up where you have to choose which game you want to play) and one for those that don't. Then I gathered the necessary graphics to use, and I was done.

Then, of course, I made the installer--of which took up most of my development time since I've never messed with a programming language like what NSIS uses. However, I got through with it nonetheless; and here we are now.


I'm very proud of this project, in that I was able to recreate/improve upon something that was thought to be lost publicly for good. Be sure to look out for more updates towards this project, as there is plenty more to come.

If you have any thoughts, comments, recommendations, etc. for this project or future projects, feel free to direct such comments either here or towards my GitHub repository (aka my Homepage link). I can't do anything too complex as of right now (like WrathED stuff or how it compiles everything, or anything else related to the ModSDK realm/RE'ing of the exe's/LUA stuff for the SAGE engine/etc), but I will be aiming to expand my knowledge on such things while striving to improve upon already-existing tools.

Thanks for reading, and have a good one :D

This is Medstar signing off.

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