[Roldom]

so I want to be able to connect two laptops, one with vista and one with windows 7 wirelessly (no internet available) so i can play diablo 1

I need the IPX protocall to play such an old school game, but it isnt supported on vista or W7, I dont particularly want to create a virtual windows XP drive on either laptop,

so far the thats the only available method thugh, does anyone have any ideas that might help?

[Silencer]

Sheesh, don't set your sights too high, Roldom! XD

I've found that networking Vista and 7 is an absolute nightmare, though a friend of mine said he did easily enough. It probably comes down to compounded problems with hardware/drivers/etc, though.

And then you want to run an old game on two disparate OS's...hmm...unless anyone here has done this specific sort of thing before, I think you're better off trawling through Google links - or better yet, Diablo fansites/fanforums. Sorry I can't be of more help, anyway.

[Roldom]

I think i may be better off buying a cable to connect the computers, its probably the easiest way :/

This post has been edited by Roldom: 04 April 2011 - 04:45 AM

[Roldom]

also i spent alot of time searching google for the answer and the best i got was creating a virtual windows xp system on my laptop, or links on to internet servers which are no use to me with this

thanks anyway

[Aptorian]

I'm going to ecco Silencers suggestion, you're sure that either the official Diable forums or one of the fanbased ones doesn't have a solution for you? The diablo games, but mostly the second one, remains very popular and is constantly being updated by Blizzard. I would be surprised if solutions didn't exist for Vista or 7 systems. After all they are still selling the games in retail.

[Roldom]

are they still selling the original diablo in retail? as far as my search could find, i either had to get a virtual windows XP opperating system, or possibly try a tcp-ip connection, but im useless with computers and im not sure if that would require an internet connection. (infact im not sure what that actually is )

I should be able to play the game with a direct cable conection, i just wanted to be cheap and save the 20 dollers its going to cost me to get one lol

if anyone else wants to try an old school game and is having the same problem, the best answer i could find is

http://www.lurkerlou...thread-353.html

ignore it till about post 13 though

[Aptorian]

You can still buy the original Diblo, Starcraft and Warcraft games in the shops here in Denmark.

[Roldom]

i dont think ive ever even seen a copy or warcraft 1, i started at warcraft 2. I think you can still easily enough get the original starcraft, but not the other two either here in australia, or back home in england.

though you can probably stil buy them online.

Sadly with the focus away from the original diablo onto there newer titles and the availability of battle.net i dont think creating the patch for diablo ones local network is high on blizzards list of prioritys.

which is a shame, as its an amazing game

[cerveza_fiesta]

Roldom, on 04 April 2011 - 04:47 AM, said:

also i spent alot of time searching google for the answer and the best i got was creating a virtual windows xp system on my laptop, or links on to internet servers which are no use to me with this

thanks anyway

Only problem there is that the virtual winxp within win7 does not have any kind of 3D graphics card drivers. 2D graphics only. Found that out the hard way when I thought I could run some XP-only drafting programs in a virtual terminal, only to find out they can't access my graphics card - which makes them completely un-usable.

[rhulad]

Roldom, on 04 April 2011 - 06:44 AM, said:

i dont think ive ever even seen a copy or warcraft 1, i started at warcraft 2. I think you can still easily enough get the original starcraft, but not the other two either here in australia, or back home in england.

though you can probably stil buy them online.

Sadly with the focus away from the original diablo onto there newer titles and the availability of battle.net i dont think creating the patch for diablo ones local network is high on blizzards list of prioritys.

which is a shame, as its an amazing game

I have Warcraft 1 (Humans and Orcs) on my computer at home and it is awesome. Officially, it is abandonware and can be found for download at abandonia. If anyone is interested, it runs pretty well on Dosbox.

[ansible]

My recommendation would to first install Hamachi and see if that lets you connect through IPX. Hamachi is easy to configure. If not then setting up your own Battle.NET server seems like it might work the best, but that would require a bit more work. Here's what I found from the almighty Google.

This link has some decent info: http://www.diablofan...ds/page__st__40

Quote

2) Playing a LAN game:

This one is more complicated. There is no IPX. Playing on Battle.NET does not work for more than one person behind a router, and no amount of fiddling with port forwarding on the router could fix this issue. We could both play on Battle.NET just not in the same game. There are solutions like KALI but they require registering and a lot of custom port forwarding settings on the router, so we didn't even bother trying.

However there is an alternative. We used a Linux (Ubuntu) Netbook to set up a local Battle.NET server. If you don't have a Linux PC around you can use the Ubuntu Live CD on a free computer in your network, nothing has to be installed on HDD. There may be a Windows version for a Battle.NET server, I'm not sure.

You need to open a terminal and execute these commands (install pvpgn from universe as root):
- sudo -s
- echo deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu karmic universe >> /etc/apt/sources.list
- aptitude update
- aptitude install pvpgn
- pvpgn-support-installer
- /etc/init.d/pvpgn start
With this your Battle.NET server should be up and running.

You have to edit the Registry (HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Battle.net/Configuration, Battle.net gateways) to add your Battle.NET server to the list of gateways, and select this gateway in game. Alternatively you can replace all existing gateways with your own server to make it connect to your own Battle.NET server.

Example how the entry can look like:
europe.battle.net
-1
Europe
192.168.0.138
0
LAN

192.168.0.138 is the local IP of the Netbook Battle.NET Server, change this to the local IP of your computer (if you don't know the IP, use 'ifconfig' or right click the network icon -> Connection Information). In Diablo, before connecting to Battle.NET, click "Change Gateway" and select "LAN", and you will be connected to your local Battle.NET server and you can create an account on there. Once connected you can create a game like in real Battle.NET, except this game will be completely local in your LAN. No internet access required (except for downloading pvpgn in Ubuntu).

So you see with a bit of fiddling even a stone age game like Diablo 1 can be fully functional in Windows 7 64bit. And it's still as much fun as it was back in the day when it was released.

http://www.lurkerlou...ead.php?tid=353

Quote

RE: The death of IPX protocol... - jakecardigan - 07-13-2010 08:26 PM

One other way to achieve a multiplayer game with a windows vista/7 computer is to use a program such as tcpcom.

You can use this program to establish a serial connection (com port) through your tcp-ip network connection.

You can get tcpcom from here:
http://www.shareware...com/tcp-com.htm

I have used it and it works great. You setup tcpcom on 2 or more computers, one of those with the "server" setting.

You then launch diablo and select multiplayer and then 'direct cable connection'. The other computers will see the game and be able to join.

I think this would be easier than dual booting into xp just to have access to ipx protocol.

Plus, since tcpcom uses tcp-ip, you can establish a game between people who are not on the same local network.
So, you could play with others over the internet and whatnot. So you could do this even when you can no longer play diablo 1 over battle.net, or if you wanted to play hellfire or one of the diablo hacked versions like TheDark or something over the internet.

Hope this helps.

Quote

One possible workaround - Belix - 05-01-2010 04:44 AM

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to let you know that I finally got at least one way to play Diablo via IPX working (and other multiplayer games confined to IPX protocol) on both Windows Vista & Windows 7. After several futile attempts to get IPX working natively in Vista & W7, I decided to think inside the box.

Yes, inside the box. VirtualBox. Clearly OS emulation isn't the most ideal or convenient solution to this problem, but it is much easier for the average user to configure VirtualBox and install Windows XP with it than configure and maintain something much more complicated, such as a dual-boot system.

I recently installed Windows 7 on my laptop, then installed VirtualBox and used it to install XP as a virtual machine that runs inside of Windows 7. VirtualBox was fairly user friendly and easy to adjust to, and once you install VirtualBox Guest Additions inside the virtual XP, you have XP running in a window and your mouse can glide from your W7 desktop right onto the XP desktop. It's beautiful, really.

But to get to the point. I installed and patched Diablo on the virtual XP system, installed and configured IPX protocols, then started a LAN game between my laptop and Windows XP desktop. Both games were able to see and join each other. It ran smooth as silk.

So, quite simply, if you have Windows XP laying around after you've upgraded to Vista or W7, I'd hang onto it, especially if you are into classic games. I had it up and running in about an hour. Might take someone else two or three if they're a little less tech savvy or can't be bothered to read some of the VirtualBox documentation.

The ONLY issue I had with this configuration is that fullscreen applications on the guest/virtual system run inside the host/real system's resolution. My laptop is a 1280x800 display and since Diablo runs at 640x480, it really didn't full up much of the screen. You can alleviate this some by reducing the host's current resolution - say to 800x600 - then Diablo takes up a good portion of the screen. And before someone asks, sorry, no, changing your video configuration to stretch the image to fill the screen doesn't work.

I realize this is an imperfect solution, but it is one that's somewhat accessible in terms of complexity and system requirements (the laptop is several years old; 2.0ghz dual-core processor, 2gb of RAM, 128mb NVIDIA). Considering the alternative to having ANY solution is no IPX-based multiplayer games on Vista or W7 at all (beyond modifying the games to use other protocols, obviously!), it's worth sharing.

Hope this helps someone else out there get some of their old multiplayer LAN favorites up and running again on their newer operating systems. Please post here if you find or develop better solutions, either for Diablo specifically or for all IPX games.

[Sindriss]

I second the mention of hamachi. Was going to write about it when I saw the thread, but ansible has done that task.

hamachi in general is just pretty great.

[Adjutant Stormy~]

Hamachi works, but there's another service that does everything hamachi does, and more, called Tunngle

[Roldom]

so even though I dont have IPX on my system and im on Win 7 i can still use hamachi or tunngle?