Attempting to play Master of Orion 2 over the internet

My friends and I like to play Master of Orion 2. Unfortunately, my friends and I live thousands of miles away from each other. MOO2 supports multiplayer via IPX and only works over a LAN. The other day me and Yeninko played a "hot-seat" game, by me setting up VNC and him connecting to my computer. This was fun once, but that method has many problems, including I can't use my computer during his turn, and I can't "minimize" or "iconify" my monitor during his turn so as to not see what he is doing.

So I dreamed up a zillion different ways to play MOO2 over the internet. This article will be me sharing the methods of this and why they didn't work with you.

If you do any research about this on the internet, they all tell you go to www.kali.net, which is a pay-for service to allow you to play MOO2 online. Unfortunately, kali.net has been dead for as long as I can tell.

My first idea was to run Linux, then to run VMWare on this, running Windows 98. People could log in, and forward X11 to thier local machines. I could copy the image eight times (or however many players) and we could run a happy LAN game.

I just so happen to have a Slackware 9.1 box with VMWare already on it.

Unfortunately, VMWare just won't run MOO2. It installs fine, but when you attempt to launch the program it just doesn't run, without any message or indication of problems.

The next idea was to use DOSBox, which I had heard run MOO2 "flawlessy and with all the bugs intact". However, in the forum, there is a thread noting MOO2 works, and IPX works, but why doesn't MOO2 work with IPX? And a developer reponse saying I don't know and it's not finished yet anyway.

Also, let's try Wine. The most recent version of wine (20050524) crashes when trying to run MOO2. Using a big fat hint from WineTools I tried an older version (20041019) and got MOO2 working. Yes! However, it crashed when I attempted to start a network game. (Just so you feel pity for me, you should know Wine takes four hours to compile on my machine, and the precompiled binaries didn't work.)

Now I've never tried to use IPX before, and I'm not certain how to set it up properly. However, I followed the IPX-Howto, downloaded ipx-tools, and did the "ipx_interface add -p eth0 802.2 0x12345678" thing from this StarCraft-under-linux-Howto.

Now I get to the "Initializing Network" screen but it still crashes before the players can join.

I should note for those attempting to follow my steps, I kept getting errors about "not able to send 8bit data to 32bit display" from Wine when attempting to do remote X11, but running a 16bit depth VNC server worked fine. MOO2 switches from 8bit to 16 bit, so you want to run the 16bit display. Don't know how or why it works 16bit but not 32.

Me and Yeninko had also attempted to run an IPX tunnel, in particular, Git. My setup is Win2K running under Virtual PC on Mac OS X 10.3.9. His was Windows XP, I'm assuming SP2. We couldn't get it to work.

Yesterday I found another program that supposedly forwards IPX packets over the internet, Hamachi. Hey Yen, wanna try? This thread makes it sound promising...

What I should do is install Windows on the PC, but not under any virtual enviroments, and install VNC on that. Then Yeninko can VNC to that machine, I can play on my mac, and theory we can have our happy game. I will resort to this, but two problems are desk space and number of players. I'd like to not have another monitor on my desk (which, granted, could be temporary, but Windows is not all that good headless), and I'd like the ability for more than two players to play. If I could get a Mac to remote display a single window (like get VirtualPC to run under X or something) I'd just copy the VPC program and image multiple times.

I'm actually going to be out of town for the next two weeks, so it's likely that this issue will not be worked on much, and also it's likely that there won't be any articles posted on this blog for two weeks. I think I leave on Saturday.

Any comments or suggestions welcome.