First post, by BaronSFel001
- Rank
- Newbie
Apologies in advance if this has ever been brought up before, but I could not find anything definitive on the boards and general searches of the web usually only come up with industrial equipment applications. I do own a PCI ethernet card (one of the countless 3Com models that were pretty much industry standard back in the 90s), problem is with all my sound and graphics cards inserted together in my ATX I am left lacking a PCI slot to spare. In a nutshell, I would like to rule out plausible alternatives before I have to resort to opening up my computer and pulling out the Diamond Stealth 3D whenever I wish to, say, play X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter or Jedi Knight online (or on home LAN) using the hardware they were best-designed for.
In those early days of online gaming, internet congestion and packet loss were not insignificant problems for the majority of the population still using 28.8k dial-up, hence these 3D games supported legacy network connections. It seemed in the game manuals that Novell's IPX protocol over LAN was encouraged over internet play even in the heyday of Microsoft's then-called Internet Gaming Zone, while direct modem and serial connections were still viable but limited to only 2 players because of the nature of the hardware. Even in the days of Doom, being restricted to just 2 players in scenarios other than co-op seems like a yawn.
Getting to the point, while I lack a spare PCI slot I have two available serial ports on the motherboard. Since I am aware serial ports are not restricted in their communication protocols (though they are very restricted in bandwidth by modern standards), I wonder if there is any viable hardware solution to connect my vintage PC's serial port to a router's ethernet port and if that would make a stable solution for LAN and internet gaming with that PC. I am unsure if older internet modems were connected by serial and capable of sending and receiving TCP packets, or if there was some type of conversion process done via the modem or ISP itself, but I am aware that broadband has virtually-eliminated the congestion problems of back then thus the only real restriction would be communication to and from the serial port itself. Keep in mind this would only be for games that get run on my vintage computer, so we are definitely talking no younger than 2000 here.
System 20: PIII 600, LAPC-I, AWE64, S220, Voodoo3, SQ2500, R200, 3.1-Me
System 21: G2030 3.0, X-fi Fatal1ty, GTX 560, XP-Vista
Retro gaming (among other subjects): https://baronsfel001.wixsite.com/my-site