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Baldur's Gate 1 on Windows 10 multiplayer won't connect

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First post, by Justin1091

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Hi,

I've been trying to play BG1 with my brother over the network (internal). He was over at my place last week and I used my Windows 98 PC to host and he played on a Windows XP PC. Worked perfectly.

A couple of years ago I played the game on Windows 2000 (hosted) and he played on Windows 8.1 (client). Also worked fine. A year ago he joined my server with his Windows 10 PC. Also good.

So, now Windows 10 has had a couple of updates and maybe this is the cause of my problem. I'm on Windows 98 (or 2000, it's a dualboot and both have the same problem), he's on Windows 10.

Upon trying to start the game Windows 10 states the game needs DirectPlay to initialize. Thats's good, it needs that for multiplayer. I installed it via control panel on his PC. In the server browser he can sometimes see my server, but when he clicks 'Join' the game states 'Unable to join game'.
I also typed in my PC's IP address, this didn't work either.

Both PC's can ping eachother and share files, they're in the same subnet and there are 0 connection issues aside from the game's. I tried some virtual machines (XP and 7) and they can connect without issue, it's only the Windows 10 PC that can't connect. A Windows 10 VM also won't connect.

What I've tried:

Install Directplay on the Windows 10 PC
Install DX9 June 2010 redistributable on the Windows 10 PC
Disable Windows Firewall
Restart switches/routers/modem
Put Win2k DirectPlay files on his Windows 10 PC
'Regsvr32' Directplay files on his PC
Using an old executable for the game, one that doesn't have a 'DirectX8 Multiplayer fix' (official by Bioware to fix Multiplayer issues with DX8 and newer)
Have the Windows 10 host and the 98-2K PC connect
Search the internet, only to find one post that describes the same issue with another game which I can't remember now.

Any suggestions? I could of course just make him play on an older machine, but because it worked some time ago with Windows 10 I want to try and find out why it won't connect.

Reply 1 of 2, by DosFreak

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When you tried the VMs that worked were they on the same machine as the server?

Also try comparing wireshark results between a working and a non-working config on both client and server.

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Reply 2 of 2, by Justin1091

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Solved, finally!

I connected both pcs directly with a cable and gave them static ip addresses. This worked.

Then put them back on the router and it still worked, put them on dhcp and didn't work anymore.

So the issue was the default gateway setting , I have a modem and a router in bridged mode. Windows98 PC is connected to the modem, while the Windows 10 pc is connected to the router.

Pointing the windows 10 pc default gateway to the router instead of the modem fixed it. I added the default gateway and gave it a low metric so that it uses that one first.

Thanks for your reply btw! Your wireshark comment inspired me to take a closer look at network level.

Update: Seems both PC's need to be pointed to the same Default Gateway. I don't know how to tell Windows 98 which default gateway to take first. In 2k and up you can specify metric, but I can't find how to do this in Windows 98. It's not that bad, when I play BG I just have to use a static IP and leave the default gateway entry empty. Because DHCP points to the first router, setting the Windows 98 to DHCP won't work.

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