Lets start with my system :
Clevo P170EM Laptop
i73720QM
Nvidia GTX 680
8GB Ram
Windows 8 Proff
I had purchased the First Decade and put a sob story to EA that I wanted to play it on Origin so they gave me a key for The Ultimate Collection for free. Awesome right? Well Origin is a heap of dirt anyway so most of the games have issue from the get go. Red Alert 3 runs ok but even that has issues.
To the point I bought the package to play RA2 Yuri's revenge with friends. I installed this on Origin and after 5 mins playing with the 1080p fix and speed fix applied I was getting crash to desktop with the Main executable has stopped working error. Great , so I searched far and wide and all everyone says is to run in compatibility mode set to win 98/ME. So I tried that and ran in admin mode. Exactly the same issue. Tried applying the unofficial patch and no changes. Longest I got was 13 mins before a crash. So this doesn't seem fixable yet friends are running it fine. I wondered if it was the 1080p part Yuri was rejecting yet agian , friends are running it fine in wide. The game actually plays amazing with the fixes. Red Alert 2 just needed slowing down. However the crashing continues.
Back to basics. I uninstalled this version and went to the First Decade box. Installed RA2 and yuri. Applied the fixer and unofficial patch. Game booted fine as it did on Origin. Played about 7 mins then the screen freezes. The game is still runnning , I can hear the sounds/music , heck when I click the screen I can still issue commands etc. Yet the picture is locked. There is definitely a display issue going on here.
Please note I've run it on the HD400 integrated intel GPU as well as the nvidia one. Same problem. I even tried lowering resolution. Same issue.
One final question , The unofficial patch , how do I know its applied other than the patcher telling me so? The version number still reads Version 1.003 on the menu screen.
Thanks you reading my waffle.