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Roadkill

What is the point of westwood EXE launchers?

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What is the point of westwood EXE launchers? Many westwood games have these. For example DOS Red Alert has RA.EXE which is not the game executable itself, but launches GAME. DAT which is the real exe for DOS Red Alert. Windows version had normal RA95.EXE file till the 3.03 patch which hid the real exe into RA95.DAT while making RA95.EXE a launcher which launches the DAT file. What are these launchers for? What is the difference between running the game from launcher and renaming the DAT file and running it directly?

Edited by Roadkill

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Unpatched Tiberian sun used this as well and IIRC in TS's case it was for copyright/ as extra security for the game.

 

There was no disadvantage or advantage between running the dat file renamed to from .dll to .exe, In fact one of the early TS patches removed this rather pointless feature and deleted the game launcher (not SUN.exe but one like in RA) and changed the game.dat to game.exe

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The launchers were for auto updates and some other WOL stuff if I remember correctly. They are quite useless now.

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