Prior to the end of 2017, the folks over at
AMD had released a new driver package for the
Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition numbered version 17.12.1. Now most of the time, updates are meant to provide fixes for bugs as well as improvements for performance. However, this update seemingly has also affected games running under the
DirectX 9 API including, but not limited to, the
Command & Conquer games as well those in the
Battle For Middle Earth series. The result is that such games are no longer able to be played.
As
PCMag reports:
Once Adrenalin is installed, Command & Conquer 3, Command & Conquer Red Alert 3, Command & Conquer 4 Tiberian Twilight, Battle for Middle Earth and Middle Earth 2, and The Witcher Enhanced Edition all have problems. The most common problem seems to be the games crashing with the error "exception in exception handler."
Source: PC Mag
On the
AMD Support Forums, a
thread was made regarding the issue but what concerned readers and fans further was this particular reply from
AMD Engineer Ray_M which mentioned:
This title is from 2007, so we are unlikely to devote any valuable engineering resources to this issue, which is most likely caused by outdated API modules.
What ensued afterwards, was a lot of outrage by passionate community members regarding this game-breaking update which led to Ray_M to simply end the discussion and lock-up the thread. However, just before the time of writing,
AMD's Director of Software Strategy + User Experience Terry Makedon, responded on his
Twitter account with some positive news for gamers and fans of affected titles:
Happy 2018 everyone!! I am seeing some stories pop up about AMD not supporting some old games. That is absolutely not true, we are identifying the bug and working on a fix asap. C&C, Witcher, BfME, etc will be working again.
That is not true. We will for sure fix this bug with SAGE engine games in an upcoming hotfix.
Thus, thankfully a solution is on the horizon and we look forward to having the issue resolved in the near future. This also goes to highlight how future updates of game engines and drivers could potentially, due to a lack of oversight, lead to legacy game support to be forfeited. Normally, this would not lead to much protests if non-prominent games are disrupted. As we have seen from this incident however, if significant classic games that still have a considerable player-base are affected, there would be a strong voice bringing the issue to light and requesting for support for such games to be reinstated.
