Great Hierophant wrote:

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.

I don't play diablo2 online but the latest patch [the one that gives the chance to respec] is fine on 98 with a voodoo5 and mx300, athlon xp in single player. That may not be quite 1999 hardware though. I have a feeling it was also fine on a g3 400 mac and a k6/3.

The directx version kills my dx8.1-compatible wildcat vp card for some reason [the card even has optimised diablo 2 settings I think], but that's a long-standing issue for that card caused by the LoD expansion iirc.

Never got into online play but all my retro PC’s are setup for Lan play in DOS, and where particle the 9x and XP PC’s can play with each other

Networking is what really kicked off my interest in computing and seeing a 2nd human player never lost its coolness for me.

I don’t really have many computer playing friends and the few I do aren’t into retro so I don’t actually play with anyone.
Network Diablo’s were always useful for a mule account. RTS’s I start up network game when I wan to play SimcityRST (just building amazing bases)
Car games and 3d shooters aren’t much point although I do enjoy 5 minutes of starting a Network game of Doom or Duke and just laying into the poor defenceless other player who just takes it. 😈

chinny22 wrote:

Never got into online play but all my retro PC’s are setup for Lan play in DOS, and where particle the 9x and XP PC’s can play with each other

Networking is what really kicked off my interest in computing and seeing a 2nd human player never lost its coolness for me.

I don’t really have many computer playing friends and the few I do aren’t into retro so I don’t actually play with anyone.

similar here. my kids used to play over the lan, but we don't seem to ever get round to it any more.

I still can use iFrag and Kali in pure DOS and my DOS machine ready to play DOOM/Duke3D online in example and another games supported by DOS version of Kali. Just look to my signature. Also specially for this few years ago i purchased my own licensed copy of NDIS3Pkt driver (Rest in peace Danel). BTW licensed key for Kali still can be purchased and this useful even without main Kali server. DOOM based games also plays flawlessy with TCPSETUP driver. But AFAIK there is no such specific players today.