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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

I remember playing Doom with two computers connected with a serial cable.

A friend and I were so desperate to play over serial that, lacking the proper serial cable, we "shimmed" the PCs with books to get the serial ports at the same height, put them back-to-back, and made a "cable" out of gender changers and null modems that we had sitting around.

I can do you one better. We emulated IPX over serial so that we could have have 3 players.

I can't seem to find any information on the net regarding this, but I know that we managed to get it working somehow. There was some dirty TSR hack that intercepted IPX calls and sent them via serial.

One of the PCs (with 2 serial ports) had to act as the "gateway" and run the game first, then the "edge" PCs could connect.

Fortunately my best friend had 2 serial ports and a seperate PS2 port for his mouse (although whenever he rage quit both of our PCs hardlocked for some reason).

If I recall correctly it only worked with a particular version of the DOOM exe - so we could only play the shareware version (despite having access to the full game). 6 months later we pooled some cash and got NE2000 cards so that we could play properly without dicking around with crazy hacks - I do recall my friend being disappointed that he could no longer crash our PCs and end the game when he lost anymore :)

Oh my god, I love this. Of all the rigged-up gaming solutions I've heard over the years, this might take the cake.

I feel that I lucked out. My area code had a dialup BBS with 40 lines, on which they ran software to tunnel IPX.

On the client side you ran SIRDOOM, which then shelled out to Doom once the connection was setup.

Best part: it was all free.

I never got the background on why they did it, and why they never charged a dime. Maybe they had aspirations to be the next DWANGO?

Who knows... but I spent many a night fragging till I dropped.

Wow, that sounds great! I used to play on DWANGO a lot as an early teen (13 or 14, back in 1994-95). Somehow I convinced the DWANGO staff to make me a moderator on the San Francisco servers... it came with responsibility to keep chat relatively civil but it also meant free Doom 2 on their service which was incredible at the time.

I ended up talking to Romero directly back then because he would make random (?) visits to various DWANGO servers. I remember him specifically being generous with his time chatting with me and others. So if you ever see this Romero, thank you!

John used to talk to me on the game's last level as well, but he was hidden behind a wall and I could not understand perfectly what he said.

I try to tell people this exact same story whenever the opportunity presents itself. It might be the first thing I've noticed similar to a "When I was your age story", except movie theaters were not 25 cents... We had multiplayer online shooters in the mid-90s.

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