Wanted to play multiplayer Doom with a friend once. We lugged my PC and monitor to his house and discovered that he had a 25-pin serial port and I only had a cable for 9-pin. Fortunately he had a box of adapters and we were able to make a “cable” completely out of adapters. We stacked up books and junk under our computers until our the serial ports were at the same height then carefully pushed them together, back-to-back, with the adapters sandwiched between.