Impressive! Broken video games motivate a lot of learning.
When I was a teenager, we had three game-capable PCs, but only two had LAN cards. I also had an underpowered LAN-connected Linux machine. I connected the non-LAN PC to the Linux box with a parallel cable. Linux could route packets between the LAN and parallel-cable network. But DOS games find each other with local broadcasts which don't forward. No game had a function to specify a network address to connect to. I needed to bridge the networks. Linux could bridge ethernet, but the parallel network wasn't ethernet. So I copied the source of a kernel module and modified it to bridge IPX packets between the LAN network and the parallel-cable network.
It worked! My friends and I could play THREE-PLAYER games! DN3D, C&C Red Alert, Quake, Descent, Terminal Velocity, etc. Network drive sharing even worked. It was glorious.
When I was a teenager, we had three game-capable PCs, but only two had LAN cards. I also had an underpowered LAN-connected Linux machine. I connected the non-LAN PC to the Linux box with a parallel cable. Linux could route packets between the LAN and parallel-cable network. But DOS games find each other with local broadcasts which don't forward. No game had a function to specify a network address to connect to. I needed to bridge the networks. Linux could bridge ethernet, but the parallel network wasn't ethernet. So I copied the source of a kernel module and modified it to bridge IPX packets between the LAN network and the parallel-cable network.
It worked! My friends and I could play THREE-PLAYER games! DN3D, C&C Red Alert, Quake, Descent, Terminal Velocity, etc. Network drive sharing even worked. It was glorious.
Nobody around me understood what I had done.