Currently Command & Conquer Ultimate Collection is 50% off, at 19.95 or something. I know it uses origin. But finally its in the price range I can accept being 3rd worlder.

Just for anyone who want to catch it at that price. 17 games, I guess it around dollar something per game. Good enough for me...

Didn't I hear, though, that the early ones like Red Alert in that collection are just as they are off the original disks - not even fully patched and you have to do the compatibility work yourself?
Or was that just anti-Origin FUD spread by haters?

Nope, the versions in Ultimate Collection are basically the same ones that appeared in The First Decade, many of which in turn have problems on Win7.

There's some fairly easy fixes for them, but they are quite obviously not patched for modern operating systems like EA claimed.

Just wanted to echo this. There are some nice user friendly installers out there for a lot of these games.

Can you be more specific? Are you talking about the older ones? Where can one find said fixes?

Well, at least they do kill explorer.exe upon startup so you don't get corrupt colors in Windows 7 (maybe also 8), that's an improvement (although that could have been achieved more elegantly with the registry fix that doesn't require to kill explorer.exe). But yeah, you still should really apply some community fixes for an optimal experience. Scrolling is ridiculously fast by default, particularly in RA, there's massive performance irregularities up to RA2 and I think some of the expansion content (like additional music pieces) that had already been restored by the community for TFD have once again to be added manually. And Zero Hour won't start for me at all, asking for the original CD. So yeah, EA once again screwed it up epically. Well, at least I don't need the TFD disc anymore, that's a start. :P Here's a few you will need:

cnc-ddraw
You will need this one to keep gameplay and scrolling speeds at sensible levels in both Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert. Run it in OpenGL rendering mode and activate vsync in the config file. IIRC you should set the frame limit to 30 FPS for optimal speed.

C&C95 Music Pack
Put this into your Tiberian Dawn directory to restore the music from the Covert Operations expansion pack.

CnCPatcher
Apply this patch to the executables of Tiberian Sun or Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge to fix performance issues in those games. I'm not sure it worked properly with my Origin version of RA2 / Yuri's Revenge. It worked perfectly fine with Tiberian Sun, though.

Classic games but typically EA show no sign of fixing the older ones.

I've seen this collection for $5 from Amazon a few times in the last few months, would hold off for them to put it on sale again tbh

If you really want some old school C&C action, why not give Open RA a try before dropping $20 on something that might not work in Windows 7 ;)

^This. And it needs always online connection from what I understood from some users. Which is a no-go for me. Hmm. I didn't knew someone was working on an opensource version :D. Never looked though.. Will keep in mind, thanks!

Can definitely recommend this one. My C&C 1 (from The First Decade) works beautifully with it.

I ran RA2 and half of Tiberian Sun so far on a Win 7 machine, I didn't notice any big problems...

I haven't tried Zero Hour at all yet, I should check.

Update: I downloaded and ran through a skirmish of Zero Hour, no problems. I wonder if Origin just doesn't bother patching existing downloads? Try downloading it again?

Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 have never had problems. Well my experience with the games it has always been the first 2 (Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert) that had a mountain of issues.

Does these include the campaigns? Wishful thinking I know.