Unable to play Icewind Dale over WLAN

[Fuzzzeeee]

Hey guys,

I came across SP while I was looking for a solution to the problems I've been having all last night. My dad, my brother and I wanted to work through Icewind Dale together, two characters each, yada yada. We first hit the problem of where the game crashes out in Windows 7 whenever you try and create or join a multiplayer game. After a bit of 'net crawling, we found that all you need to do is go into Windowed mode when you click Create/Join and then back to fullscreen afterwards.

Unfortunately, our next issue has us completely stumped. We're all connected via wireless LAN on our home network, and have no trouble playing some other games (Age of Mythology and Dungeon Siege specfically, though both of those are Microsoft Games so maybe that's a factor?). No matter what we try, be it turning off firewalls, making sure we're all patched to v1.42 etc., any time we try and join a game we get the same "Cannot connect to game session" error.

As wonderful as Windows 7 is, it makes me sad that it has compatibility issues for older games, especially when it comes to multiplayer. I remember when we all had XP several years ago, we played IWD over the network perfectly fine, so is this just an irreparable OS problem or something else?

Thanks for your help in advance,
Fuzz.

[Gavial]

A complete shot in the dark.
Did you try to connect just two of you?
Or even connect with wires instead of wireless, just to check.

[Fuzzzeeee]

Nope, although I have been tempted to try that just to see if it works. I'm sure we have a crossover cable around somewhere, so I'll give that a shot. Honestly, if that didn't fix it then it would leave it to be pretty much exclusively just an OS problem, because I can't see how else it could just not work. Since Hamachi isn't an option for us, I'm not sure what else there is we can try.

[Taluntain]

GameRanger?

[Fuzzzeeee]

Not to be cynical here, but that's exactly what I'm going to be... what's the catch?

[Taluntain]

Huh?

http://www.gameranger.com/

[Fuzzzeeee]

I managed to find and read up about it, I just can't imagine that something that awesome exists. Is it only partly free but then costs? Or do you have to pay for extra features? The information they supply on their website is pretty sparse, and I'm not one to just go and download things without knowing as much as I can about it first.

[Taluntain]

To my knowledge it's free but I've never used it. It has been around for many years though so I assume it's a legit service. Getting the IE games to work in multiplayer can be a royal PITA most of the time so anything that helps, free or costing a few bucks, is worth it IMO.

[Fuzzzeeee]

Fair enough. I know it's been around since 1999 or something on Mac, and I'm sure it's legit, my only other concern is any security risks it might pose. I've done a whole lot of trawling through the internet today, and found disturbing lack of any information on how it actually works (whether it requires port forwarding, P2P networking etc.), so that makes me anxious. It may sound excessive, but something which has a lot of users doesn't necessarily mean that its security is as tight as it probably should be (Skype is a good example).

Your suggestion is greatly appreciated regardless Tal; I'll probably run it by the others and we'll make a decision on it.

[Taluntain]

Np, I hope it works out for you.

[Fuzzzeeee]

This may be a bit of a thread necro, but I thought it would be worthwhile posting the solution that I've found for this in case anybody else has had any similar problems.

Instead of trying to use TCP/IP, we downloaded a handy little program called IPXWrapper, which as the website says:

IPXWrapper is a wrapper library which emulates IPX support while tunneling the packets over UDP. This allows you to run legacy games and other software that require IPX without having to install the IPX driver which is unavailable as of Windows Vista/Server 2008.

After a bit of fiddling around, we got this to work with Icewind Dale (as well as other games like Heroes of Might and Magic III) and it's ridiculously simple to set up. Go to this site and download the .zip folder, extract it, and then follow the instructions in the readme. A couple of things we discovered is that being on an Administrator account is usually required (instead of just using "Run as administrator"), and the registry file is worthwhile doing in case DirectPlay causes a problem. Once it's set up, simply go into the games' multiplayer options and select IPX, and it should work like a dream!

Hopefully this is helpful to others who have had the same problem, now to relive some fantastic moments in gaming...

Cheers,
Fuzz.