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I miss the bad old days of IPX

Posted: Thu Apr 23, 2015 05:35 am
by The Nameless Player
Why back in the old days, we had LAN parties so big, we couldn't even fit everyone into the same BloodBath. Ten players! Half of the guys had to change to a different IPX socket number, and it was a gamble to see which network game would go out of sync first, or who would accidentally on purpose press his Win key because he was losing, or if player one would force quit everyone, or if anybody would say screw you guys I want to play another level and I'm taking the rest of you with me. It was awful, back when people played Blood. We can try to recapture that experience with emulation and IPX tunnels but life is so much better now the Win key doesn't do anything anymore.

Re: I miss the bad old days of IPX

Posted: Fri Apr 24, 2015 06:42 am
by Tchernobog
For me it was playing Duke Nukem 1 on Windows XP that gave me the worst problems when it came to the Windows key.

I was seven or eight at the time.

Re: I miss the bad old days of IPX

Posted: Fri Apr 24, 2015 10:36 pm
by dosgamer000
I actually never was apart of a LAN party before and I had no friends to play my games with. It took until years later when I discovered Skulltag/Zandronum that I started to play games online via coop mostly. The windows key was the bane of my existence, as I did not use WSAD keys back then.

I remember digging through the CDs of old windows games like Duke 3D, Sonic CD, and Blood in a vain attempt to get it running. Back then, Blood would never work at all for my computer and actually playing it again was the dream. This was before dosbox and before I had the internet to reference stuff. I didn't have a mp3 player so most of my music listening consisted of rumaging through game audio files. The Sonic CD files themselves had music from older Sonic titles too, so there was much to play.

Now most of my gaming activities are mostly playing emulated games, the occasional Blood/Doom map, and browsing the web for fan-art of old games.

Re: I miss the bad old days of IPX

Posted: Sun Apr 26, 2015 10:06 am
by The Nameless Player
The Windows key can be disabled. I forget exactly which tool we used with Windows 95, but I think it was an old version of WinKey Killer. Of course anybody who wanted to hit the Windows key on purpose to freeze a DOS game and send the network out of sync during a LAN party .... would deliberately forget to enable WinKey Killer. The sensible thing to do would be to exit Windows entirely and reboot into MS-DOS, but loading the IPXODI driver by hand is such a chore.