Help Visual Studio and Renegade <Source Code Modernization>

[Pedeca]

The original post is no longer an issue.

Renegade and SAGE's Visual Studio 6.0 project (dsp) and workspace (dsw) files can easily be opened in any Visual Studio that's 2019 or prior (though EA recommends .NET 2003 for the initial conversion).

None of the files are corrupted despite what your computer might tell you. If you are using Windows or Mac, you will need to edit the End of Line (EOL) format since whoever uploaded the source code files was using a Unix/Linux machine.

What's the End of Line? See those empty spaces between my paragraphs? Those are created by pressing the Return/Enter key. That's handled differently depending on the operating system and it's not a universal format. Unix/Linux uses the LF format, Mac has the CR format, and Windows uses CR LF. All of the EA C&C source files uploaded to Github are in the Unix LF format. It's rather interesting that EA uses Unix/Linux, but also rather inconvenient that they didn't feel the need to mention that in the source code information. You will need to edit the files individually to get them into the correct format so that they can be read by your chosen workspace.

Further note: EA also forgot to include the GameSpy workspace (dsw) and project (dsp) files when they removed the source code from the public release. It's a minor gripe, as you will end up replacing GameSpy with something like UniSpy or OpenSpy, but programs like Visual Studio will note the absence and not produce any updated file hierarchy (which would be nice to study how Westwood connected all the GameSpy source code, oh well).

The modernization process for Renegade and Generals' source codes is proving to be as troublesome task as I first predicted.

The first hurdle is to have a working copy of Visual Studio 6.0, and then to upgrade it to Service Pack 5 (the latest version). Although I got VS6 to run on Windows 10, it just doesn't allow me to open files without crashing the program (likely due to my security, but that's difficult prospect in itself). Installing it in a Virtual Machine has its own problems (memory limitations being one of them depending on the version of Windows), but could be ideal.

Thus, I am here to ask for some reinforcements on this issue.

The objective is clear: get Visual Studio 6.0 either installed on your own system or a virtual machine. The version does not seem to matter, so either Professional or Enterprise seems to work. Just remember, if getting the installation disks off of the Internet Archive (or physically) to remember that Professional Edition has 2 disks and Enterprise Edition has 3 disks (you can either mount them in a disk reader or unzip all parts into the same folder with PowerISO), and all disks must be of the same language.

Then you need to get the Service Pack 5 (SP5) update for VS6 and successfully install it. If correctly installed, the name of VS6 should update in the "About Visual C++" option in the "Help" section.

All that being done, you can then open the .dsw file into the program and then follow the steps on the source code repositories on how to rebuild the sources (Build > Rebuild, but also the code will either need to change, be removed, or get the OG files for the rebuild).

After that is successfully done, it can be then be opened in Visual Studio .NET 2003 and be converted to a modern VS project. That part is really easy, .NET 2003 can be installed and ran in modern Windows no problem, but the code must be rebuilt first in VS 6.0, and that's where headaches come from. And from there any modern Visual Studio will be able to open it and tell which parts need changing.

Alternatively, one could just build the VS projects from scratch using the files and basing the connections on the dsw files. But this is its own work. Either way, I'm taking a break from this endeavor, I've lost too much sleep on this already.

How it has felt attempting to get VS 6.0 to install and work correctly:

Edited yesterday at 07:25 AM by Pedeca
No longer an issue.