About
Enemy Nations is a 1996 real-time strategy game by Windward Studios, in which the player is one of several alien races that have discovered a planet and must fight the others for the right to colonize it first; it was released as freeware with its source code in October 2005. Enemy Nations Revival is a source-code revival and port of Enemy Nations, moving the original 32-bit MFC/DirectDraw/WinG codebase to a modern 64-bit build using SDL2 that runs natively on Windows, Linux, and macOS. It removes the original CD requirement, restores music on all three platforms, and replaces the original IPX-based networking with TCP/UDP multiplayer; save files from the original game still load.
How it differs from the original
The port swaps the original's MFC/DirectDraw/WinG rendering and CD requirement for SDL2, and replaces IPX networking with TCP/UDP (players currently need to be mutually reachable — same LAN, bridged VMs, or port forwarding — since cross-NAT play isn't supported yet). A few known issues remain: the multiplayer lobby can mislabel remote players' races as 'Human' even though the correct race is applied at game start, and a rare map-generation roll can occasionally produce an unplayable starting region.
Getting started
Self-contained archives for Windows, Linux, and Apple Silicon macOS are available from the project's releases page — each one bundles the game, its roughly 516 MB data file, and all runtime libraries, so it just needs to be unzipped and run. Building from source instead requires separately obtaining that same data file and placing it next to the built executable.
History
This is a revival of Enemy Nations' original source code, which Windward Studios released as freeware in October 2005. The project's stated goal began as simply getting the 1996 code compiling with minimal changes, before growing into a full SDL2 port, building on an earlier fork by a contributor known as Bobbias.
Known limitations
- gameplay: A rare worldgen roll can produce an unlandable start region, requiring map re-roll.
- multiplayer: Loading a multiplayer save requires all peers to be reachable.
- ui: The lobby may show remote players as "Human", though races are applied correctly at game start.