Play Red Alert 2 on a Mac M1

Introduction

I play Red Alert 2, and have been struggling to get it working on a mac with wine since they dropped support for 32 bit apps. I use a modified version of openra to play, which I found was great at giving me the added bonus of a "remastered" feel to the game.

Install

Install dotnet 6:

Warning

You cant use dotnet from homebrew, you have to use the Microsoft version.

Note

Get the latest version from here: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download

wget "https://download.visualstudio.microsoft.com/download/pr/a91e812a-f286-4b1b-b050-f9612c4f5ec9/dd24f826e0c99945066987df1f7ec790/dotnet-sdk-6.0.411-osx-x64.pkg"
open dotnet-sdk-6.*

Now link the binary to your environment

sudo ln -sf /usr/local/share/dotnet/x64/dotnet /usr/local/bin/

Install packages

brew install wget unzip sdl2 openal-soft freetype lua51

Now download OpenRA with the ra2 mod:

cd ~
wget "https://github.com/OpenRA/ra2/archive/master.zip"
unzip master.zip
cd ra2-master
make all

Create the game directory:

mkdir ~/Library/Application\ Support/OpenRA/Content/ra2

Copy the game files

Note

Replace ~/Games/RedAlert2/ with the location of your RA2 files.

cp -r ~/Games/RedAlert2/* ~/Library/Application\ Support/OpenRA/Content/ra2/

Launch the game with

./launch-game.sh