Late last year, Red Alert: A Path Beyond 2.1 became available for download. Reaching further back to last April, the older version RA:APB 2.0 was released here on ModDB with plans for a release on the Desura service, the ModDb answer to Valve's Steam platform. That fell through, however, and as of June 2011 we had given up on it happening and stopped bothering with that.
Somehow, a version of RA:APB 2.1 has become available for download (at least temporarily?) from Desura for February 2012. From what we can tell, around 400 users have been able to download and install a copy in the past three weeks.
The problem is, this installation from Desura does not seem to give you the vital Microsoft DirectX 9 components needed to play, and most likely won't install the Microsoft C++ components either. A warning is thrown and the game closes instead of connecting to a server.
Sorry for the trouble. We're trying to figure out what happened. If you're looking to download the game, please use the downloads section.
I downloaded it from Desura more than a week ago, it did have some problems connecting to some of the servers, but not all of them, I managed to play the game pretty much OK...
Are we talking about RA:APB specific components, or general DX9? I'd think most people would already have the latter.
I hope this doesn't hurt the chances of eventually having an official desura release.
An official Desura release was already off the table, although it wasn't our call.
APB uses certain updated DirectX 9 files that a fresh Windows XP install won't have unless they're updated purposely (possibly from installing another late Dx9 game), and Vista/Win7 do not come with the DirectX 9 files at all so newer system install doesn't have what it needs.
So there's a chance that you have what you need, but in the (past when it was optional in our installers) we had users skipping the Dx9 installation because they already had Dx10 and felt it was not necessary.
I don't know about the other people, but I skipped the DX 9.0c installation because I had installed it already to go along with other commercial games. I was asking because it never occurred to me at the time that certain required components, namely the ones games would insist on installing, wouldn't be universal between games. Thanks for the explanation.
Note to all DX9 users: use Microsoft's official web update that will install all your missing files: Microsoft.com