Registry is corrupt and has been altered.

[SON BEE R C A]

You get the message when you click on Multiplayer, Online, and then login. It seems that online play is working but kicks you out of the screen where you can join in games. This is coming from a fresh installation of C&C Generals from steam and not sure why this would occur. I'm sure because C&C Generals has just released it on steam that they would fix this particular problem which is actually a major issue for many RTS gamers coming from a lot of different countries.

[animal_PLANET]

C&C Generals ran MP off the old gamespy servers. Shut down years ago. This version does not support MP natively. You need game ranger or CNC:online to play online.

[WhitePhantom]

They made them work on modern operating systems, and left it at that. Which is fine really, as I expect it would be a lot of effort to get online working again for such a huge collection of games to accommodate the relatively small percentage of players who are interested .

They don't mention it in the main text of the store page, but all of these new releases are tagged as single player games.

[SON BEE R C A]

Originally posted by animal_PLANET:

C&C Generals ran MP off the old gamespy servers. Shut down years ago. This version does not support MP natively. You need game ranger or CNC:online to play online.

Ok I installed and activated Game Ranger. I see that there are tons of games online that you can join however I think they aren't run by the steam version because it says Invalid Selection "Please choose the game application for Command Conquer Generals". I did choose the Generals.exe. Is there anything from Steam that is going to support running it on Game Ranger or at least something that Steam is going to fix about having Online play integrated?

Even though you may think that there's a small number of RTS gamers on this game, it's still one of the best games.

Back in the day I use to play this on LAN with college friends but now I'm very eager to play this online against the world.

[animal_PLANET]

Try Gen patcher. https://legi.cc/downloads/genpatcher/

As of now there are no players for Generals on game ranger or C&C:online unfortunately. So good luck trying to find games.

I have Generals but not Steam version. So it may take a bit to get the patchers and others online play working for Steam version. But game patcher does state that it supports steam. So that should help.

[SON BEE R C A]

Originally posted by animal_PLANET:

Try Gen patcher. https://legi.cc/downloads/genpatcher/

As of now there are no players for Generals on game ranger or C&C:online unfortunately. So good luck trying to find games.

I have Generals but not Steam version. So it may take a bit to get the patchers and others online play working for Steam version. But game patcher does state that it supports steam. So that should help.

Just tested this and it works for Generals online but haven't figured out how to get Zero Hour to run. Plus it seems that the game will only run fullscreen. For some reason setting the windows mode option from Gen Patcher is greyed out.

I'm sure that there will be a fix on these things soon.

So far so good to get at least something running using online play.

[animal_PLANET]

For ZH. Try rebuilding the options.ini file and/or Delete the dbghelp.dll file.

https://windowsreport.com/command-and-conquer-generals-windows-10/

https://www.gamereplays.org/community/index.php?showtopic=807601

https://www.gamereplays.org/cnczerohour/portals.php?show=index&name=gentool&tab=8280900

[SON BEE R C A]

Originally posted by animal_PLANET:

For ZH. Try rebuilding the options.ini file and/or Delete the dbghelp.dll file.

https://windowsreport.com/command-and-conquer-generals-windows-10/

https://www.gamereplays.org/community/index.php?showtopic=807601

https://www.gamereplays.org/cnczerohour/portals.php?show=index&name=gentool&tab=8280900

Appreciate the response. By the way I didn't have to go through all of those links to get Zero Hour to work but thanks for being very helpful because after paying for the game I was first disappointed on not getting online play.

I think it might be good to keep these links as a reference for any future problems that may occur.

So going back to what I did on Game Ranger in which you can see a lot of games hosted there is an Options menu on the Games tab. If Game Ranger can find the game the title is bold and marks the Location of the generals.exe file that runs the game. However initially the title wasn't bold. If you look at the titles that aren't bold the Location is displayed as "Not Found", it means that Game Ranger can't find the proper location file of the generals.exe.

The answer to the problem that occurred on my machine was that there is a generals.exe in the "Command and Conquer Generals" folder however Game Ranger does not identify as the real game application and kept marking it as "Not Found". After doing some guesses in looking at the subdirectories of this subroot folder there is a folder called launcher which also has a filename generals.exe.

I was able to successfully set both Generals and Zero Hour of the generals.exe file under launcher and Game Ranger identified it as a real game application.

This is very important for RTS Gamers to get this working because as a college student in the early 2000's this game was played on LAN only and many students were just graduating from high school. Command and Conquer is one of the best RTS games even though not as popular as other titles because other companies not coming from Electronic Arts such as Blizzard has much better netplay support.

There are other so-called RTS games that are popular but do not simulate the real war times because the present isn't really there, only the past and future. Games like StarCraft and WarCraft seem to be way over the ancient times as war. Command and Conquer makes the General rank in the military as the president in power and holds the nuke button just like in World War I and World War II.

Anyways talking about politics and nuclear wars I wanted to discuss about Game Ranger and what Electronic Arts should be doing is trying to make this all integrated in steam for netplay however if the netplay isn't supported because Electronic Arts seems to run some technical issue then Game Ranger would have some potential in running as a popular online option.

My Experiences in Game Ranger is that Zero Hour has tons of games hosted much more than the original Generals version but in my experience it's better to host a game than join one unless the host stops putting in passwords so that more games that are hosted can be found. What I did was host the original Generals version and then went to Multiplayer, Network, Create Game, and then Play Game.

I got a few games against the opponent however be warned that the opponent is competitive. If you are just starting to learn this game you will have a lot of trouble trying to win because the games seems to be unfairly at an advantage from experience play. I don't think a lot of the opponents are running the steam version because some of the users were talking about serial keys which is the classic installation of the game sold before steam released it.

I am hoping that the competition can be lowered so that popularity can be increased because as I have said that Command and Conquer deserves to be one of the top popular games. I was surprised that Electronic Arts sold the entire bundle for less than $10.

[Skittles]

Originally posted by animal_PLANET:

C&C Generals ran MP off the old gamespy servers. Shut down years ago. This version does not support MP natively. You need game ranger or CNC:online to play online.

so what you are saying is....they aren't using steam servers to let everyone play online?

[animal_PLANET]

Originally posted by Skittles:

Originally posted by animal_PLANET:

C&C Generals ran MP off the old gamespy servers. Shut down years ago. This version does not support MP natively. You need game ranger or CNC:online to play online.

so what you are saying is....they aren't using steam servers to let everyone play online?

Nope. EA too lazy to update game with Steam version with High resolution support and online play. But hey, they still getting their money right? LOL

[interpol99]

Similar problem to OP, although sadly similar solution did not work. Ran Gentools and Genpatch, then installed Game ranger. When I try to select the right installer, it tells me "Please choose the game application for Command Conquer Generals Zero Hour". Despite navigating through the game files and choosing every launcher/.exe file I could find, gives me the same error message every time. And that includes trying to select the .exe in the "launcher" folder.

Any idea how to solve this?

[Legionnaire]

Originally posted by interpol99:

Similar problem to OP, although sadly similar solution did not work. Ran Gentools and Genpatch, then installed Game ranger. When I try to select the right installer, it tells me "Please choose the game application for Command Conquer Generals Zero Hour". Despite navigating through the game files and choosing every launcher/.exe file I could find, gives me the same error message every time. And that includes trying to select the .exe in the "launcher" folder.

Any idea how to solve this?

Run GenPatcher again and click on Apply Fixes again.