Summary

  • Command and Conquer: Red Alert is a open-source 1996 real-time strategy game released under the GPLv3 licence, and its codebase has recently been successfully ported to the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller.
  • Blogger Charlie Birks wrote a series of posts on Mastodon documenting the process and incremental improvements over several days, with the game eventually able to run missions and utilise multiplayer functions between two Picos.
  • The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 was not quite sufficient to run the game, so Birks used the upgraded Pimoroni Pico Plus 2 W, and an SD card was also required to save memory.
  • All of the code changes have been published in a fork of Red Alert on GitHub for other developers to use.

By Tom Nardi

Original Article