Greeting fellow reigners.

I am sure that some of you are part of the CNC community and are no doubt aware that CNCDDRAW exists,
which was created originally by hifi to allow CnC95 and RA95 to run on modern OSes, it also then was expanded to include support for the win95 version of Carmageddon 1 and is used the special win95 patch made by the carmageddon community, you also might be aware that hifi ceased developing it and funkyfr3sh from the CNCnet community resumed development of it.

anyways it now offers compatibility with Dark Reign 1!

GOG 1.4 Install instructions:

1. Install Dark Reign 1
2. Download CNCDDraw from The github here, which as of this writing is 1.3.0.0
3. Extract the CNCddraw zip to the Dark Reign 1 install folder.
4. Choose which version of the game to run (Original or Expansion using the GOG provided exe files.
5. It may take a bit of time to load
6. Enjoy!


I cannot test it with Win10, so if you want to do so, go ahead! I cant see why it wouldn't work, but proceed at your own risk as there might be issues under that operating system.

I do not recommend using 1.7 with cnccddraw as it causes a crash when trying to save your game under Win 7.

Windows 10 Issues:
It has been brought to my attention that on Windows 10, with or without cncddraw you currently cannot save your game. THIS IS NOT A FAULT OF CNCDDRAW from what I have investigated it is a issue with the game itself.This is separate from the saving issue with using cncddraw with 1.7


Also to note: I am currently on Windows 7, I do not use Windows 10 myself yet.

If you have problems feel free to post below, I might be able to help.

Happy Reigning!

Wow ! It works !!!! It works !!!!

Patch 1.7 never worked for me but this, at last, works !!!!

Thank you and thank the team for this marvellous patch !

How come the 1.7 team never worked with them? Dark reign can be a thing again !!!!

1.7 has interesting features though, sad there is an issue between the two... I hope they will be able to figure something out !

By the way, there is a Dark Reign mod for OpenRA, it is far from finished but at least it is in project.
Can't wait to see what Dark Reign will look like in 19201080 !

Going to get back to Dark Reign now ! Thanks again !!!!

thats why I shared, because when I noticed that dark reign was added to the list, I was happy!
yeah sad about 1.7 so I have decided to remove instructions related to 1.7 in the mean time.

Wow I didn't knew that something like this exist, many thanks!

I just did a test to run the game at 1920x1080 (with aspect ratio), and it looks cool.
I'm going to continue my current expansion game with this!

How do you do that?

One of the files that you extract from the zip (ddraw.ini) can be edited and it has multiple options inside to tweak the visuals, activate vsync, framerate, etc.

Dark Reign always worked. I've mentioned it before that you should use the starter exes from Dark Reign 1.4b. It's gone now because darkreign.ws is down. But it had a lot of downloads. I wonder why no one shared it here! I don't have them either anymore unfortunately. The Dark Reign 1.7 has new starter exes. It's just that some antivirus softs detect them as trojan or something.

The only problem with win 10 ist that you can't save thr game anymore. It works sometimes the first 5 min into the game. But after 5 minutes of playing and you try to save it. It will crash.

Yeah this isnt about 1.7 not working, its about how some peeps dont like 1.7, and now we have a better solution then trying to track down 1.7

as for windows 10, I dont know about that one, I am still on windows 7 but I will amend my post with a warning about W10 and saving.

Windows 10 is a nightmare in many ways. There was a time Windows 10 blocked Dark Reign completely. It was not possible to even start the game.

I would like to know if it is possible to make Dark Reign run on Linux! I kinda noticed that most tools and even browser I use are available on Linux.

I've just tried that. Dark Reign does kinda run lighter with this. But I can't say it improves anything. It also does not fix the savegame error on Windows 10.

Don't expect it too, the only thing that will solve that issue is a patch to the exe, so hopefully like with the simcity 2000 windows edition (which had a similar problem) some kind person comes along and patches it.

Like I said it has already been patched 2002. Unfortunately nobody posted the starter exes from dark reign 1.4b. I only have one for dk expansion. It's in my Evolution of Xenite Addon.

I have been in contact with someone who might be interested in making a patched EXE for1.4 but he is a) out of the country for another 3 months and b) would have to do some reverse engineering.

I see. It would be great.