Warcraft II is one of the best computer games ever created. It is relatively simple, has an interesting plot, and has a challenging single player mode. It is, however, a few years old and doesn’t “just work” on modern LANs. If you’re having trouble, here are a few tips.
First:
- You’ll want to make sure you have the Battle.net edition of the game installed. Modern processors are literally too fast for the original version, but the bug is fixed in Battle.net. It also adds a few upgrades and enhancements.
- It runs at least through Windows XP (I don’t know about Vista), but you’ll need to have Mac OS 10.4 or lower, as you need classic.
Now, to actually get the game to work over a LAN in Windows XP, here’s what you have to do.
- Install the game on all the computers you want to play on.
- Connect the computers over a LAN. If you don’t have control over your LAN (like at college), it’s good to know that the computers don’t actually have to be connected through a router or DHCP server. You can just use a switch (which is also much cheaper than a router) and plug cords from it into all the computers.
- On all the computers, go to the Network Connections pane in the Control Panel. Right click on the connection you intend to play over (usually “Local Area Connection”) and select properties.
- On the “General” tab, click the “Install” button.
- Select “Protocol” and hit “Add”.
- Select “NWLink IPX/SPX/NetBIOS Compatible Transport Protocol” and hit OK.
- Go into Warcraft and you should now be able to use the IPX option to create a multiplayer game.
This should be all you have to do on most computers. If, however, you are having trouble connecting to the game, there are a few more steps to do. I found that I could see the game I created in the list of available games, but could not join it. I would get a “waiting for response” notice. If this happens to you, try this:
- On any computers with multiple network interfaces (wireless, bluetooth, etc.), for each interface you are not using to play over, right click and go to properties.
- In the list of protocols on the “General” tab, uncheck the IPX protocol. Multiplayer should now work.
As I understand it, what happens is that with IPX either the game or the protocol isn’t smart enough to handle multiple network interfaces. Sometimes packets may get sent to the wrong interface, causing them to be lost and the game not to connect. (Credit goes to this forum for putting me on to the fix. There’s also another fix listed there, but it did me no good.)
Happy gaming!
Please let me know if this works for you; I see a lot of people looking at this, but I don’t know if it helped any of them.� If you had to do something else, let me know, and I’ll update the post with the relevant information.
Tags: gaming, IPX, LAN, Warcraft 2, windows
Your blog has been looking very pasty of late. It makes me think of sad, fluorescent office lighting. Where are the happy banner pictures of yesteryear?
anybody here know of a good site to find more info on multiplayer websites? I\’ve got this site bookmarked and im gonna keep checking it out, but i still would like to find a site that covers multiplayer websites a little more thoroughly..thanks
umm yeah like I got two comps with linksys wireless cards to my router. and i did the two extra steps with disabling the other connections ipx. but it still had teh waiting for repsonse. so i just disabled the other network connections. and it still says waiting for response? i guess ill just get my switch out and connect em to that. but idk what else to try for teh wireless?
Does it work over wired LAN then? I never messed with it on wireless, so I’m not sure if I can help.
Couldnt get it working really, we can now see each others games we created but it just gets stuck on the waiting for response thing. I didn’t quite understand what you wrote about the solution for that so i couldnt get it fixed.
Would be really cool if you could e-mail me and try to explain it in a more simple way. Would be really cool to play with my little brother.
Thanks a lot, it worked great! Just enabled the IPX.
I have Vista and it says Vista doesn’t support IPX/SPX.
I don’t know what to do…
If anyone knows, please tell.
Worked for me! Thanks man.
It works, thanks a lot. Only the “Waiting for response” bug wasn’t fixed with this tips.
I’ve run into a wall trying to get multiplayer to work over a lan with Windows 7. This operating system does not support IPX/SPX and so the game will run but only in single player mode. There is an “XP Mode” that can be installed which does havee IPX/SPX, but in “XP Mode” there is a graphics problem and the game won’t start. Any ideas?
Sorry, probably not going to be much help. I haven’t tried it out in Windows 7. One thing you could try is getting an old copy of XP and spinning it up on a virtual machine using VirtualBox or VMWare.
http://blogo.biz/?p=111
just install IPXWrapper and it will work