Hmm not really. Multiplayer is one area were I DO like to play modern games like BF3 or Black Ops 2. But with vintage games it's much more an individual hobby of mine 😀

Do you mean LAN playing or on the internet?

Year 1999 and Mutliplayer?
Well there were tons of games at this time already supporting multiplayer.

For DOS worthwhile games can be Duke3D, Doom2, OMF, Death Rally and Warlords 2 Deluxe.
Windows9x probably Micro Machines V3, Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft 2, CivNet, Earth 2140, 2150 as well as the early CnC games, Freespace, Freespace 2, Dethkarz, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Alpha Centauri, DungeonKeeper, Forsaken, Revolt, Worms Armageddon.
And then there are also the MMORPGs which are nowadays not playable anymore in the same way as 1999, like Ultima Online, Meridian59, Everquest, Asherons Call, The 4th Coming, Tibia...
Then there are the MUDs and BBS games, like VGA Planets and so on.

Rainbow Six, Quake2 and Quakeworld (sadly their scenes are down to desperate measures including piracy to gain fodder, unlike Q3A). Also the many, many top down ship shooters that were a popular subgenre, such as Subspace (now Continuum these days), ARC, Battle City, etc.
Tribes was also huge, it still has a scene and a new master, but it's rather elitist now.

I played Unreal Tournament online using my PIII & Voodoo 3 setup not too long ago... The guys over at EAB hired a dedicated gaming server 😀. I rarely use my old box for multiplayer games these days.

The method does not matter, Internet, LAN, Modem, Null-Modem, email, side-by-side.

I know lots and lots of mid-to-late 90s games offered some kind of multiplayer option, but I am interested in people who use the vintage hardware we so often talk about to play specific multiplayer PC games on it.

As for current games with active online scenes, Continuum is playable on Pentium machines and high-end 486s 😀

Years ago I had a successful test with Odamex (Doom multiplayer) on a AM5x86, as that uses the old Zdoom 1.2x revision as a baseline which doesn't have the slow sound code later Zdooms are known for. Didn't test current versions of Zdaemon or Zandronum

I have always tried to maintain multi-playability across our LAN of these games-
Warcraft 1,2,3
Diablo 1,2
StarCraft
Quake 1,2,3
UT2004
Heretic/Hexen/Doom
Aliens vs Predator
Worms (forget which, 2 I think)
Unreal
Maybe others too, but my kids have grown up so for the last few years it"s lapsed. The hardware varies over time too, there's upgrade fever and the usual upward drift.

Great Hierophant wrote:

The method does not matter, Internet, LAN, Modem, Null-Modem, email, side-by-side.

I know lots and lots of mid-to-late 90s games offered some kind of multiplayer option, but I am interested in people who use the vintage hardware we so often talk about to play specific multiplayer PC games on it.

I was playing classic UT online a few weeks ago on Xeon Prime.

I don't play such games multiplayer anymore, but I used to a lot with friends over old modem connections. Hearing that annoying old modem connection sound is pretty nostalgic as a result. ;)

It's also good to note that DOSBox has the components to connect old games together over typical internet connections, or even two DOSBox instances together on a single machine, through a game's internal network connectivity. I do this for testing the multiplayer aspects of certain games I review to see how they work and if they're worth mentioning in some way.

is GBA count ?

The original starcraft STILL gets played online from time to time in my house.

Gemini000 wrote:

It's also good to note that DOSBox has the components to connect old games together over typical internet connections, or even two DOSBox instances together on a single machine, through a game's internal network connectivity. I do this for testing the multiplayer aspects of certain games I review to see how they work and if they're worth mentioning in some way.

Dosbox MB6 has even NE2000 included that uses Winpcap to directly simulate an additional NE2000 network adapter for this Dosbox process on the network. This means you can even mix Multiplayer games that run in Dosbox(es) and games on real Retro PCs in the same LAN.

elianda wrote:

Dosbox MB6 has even NE2000 included that uses Winpcap to directly simulate an additional NE2000 network adapter for this Dosbox process on the network. This means you can even mix Multiplayer games that run in Dosbox(es) and games on real Retro PCs in the same LAN.

I wonder how that works in conjuction with Kali. 😁

leileilol wrote:

elianda wrote:

Dosbox MB6 has even NE2000 included that uses Winpcap to directly simulate an additional NE2000 network adapter for this Dosbox process on the network. This means you can even mix Multiplayer games that run in Dosbox(es) and games on real Retro PCs in the same LAN.

I wonder how that works in conjuction with Kali. 😁

Does anyone still use Kali or some other IPX TCP/IP emulator today?

luckybob wrote:

The original starcraft STILL gets played online from time to time in my house.

Same here! I mean, it's cheaper than SC II, and it has much lower hardware requirements, so why not? Also, I like the "feel" of the gameplay better than SC II overall. 😁

Yes, I am playing UT on my PIII/V3 rig from time to time on the servers that allow it. I'm always interested in playing vintage DOS and Windows games over the internet. One that could really be a lot of fun from the footage I've seen is Magic Carpet.

Did you make the thread just out of curiosity, or are you interested in getting a multiplayer community going?

It seems that Quake III, Unreal Tournament, Diablo II and Starcraft are probably the only games which can adequately run on 1999-era vintage hardware that people are still playing online.

I wonder if for any of these games, that patches have destroyed Windows 9x compatibility or increased the system requirements so that 1999 hardware now crawls on these games. I have read that for the FPS games, many servers require a guest too run the game on Windows 2K or newer.

Q3A 1.30 adds some pro maps that have huge levelshots that causes quite a crawl when turning the maplist page and also adds a rarely ever used rocket explosion effect that takes around 32 whole textures to load even when disabled, taking some precious VRAM.