"multiplayer" sections in mainscreen & options.ini

[OncomingStorm1984 4]

Do the "Multiplayer" sections in options.ini and mainscreen actually work or are they deprecated? I was hoping that I could hook the boys up to Hamachi and try a local LAN session.

[+EricJ 3,933]

Deprecated, and as far as I  know Hamachi works with SF1 only.

[+VonS 1,423]

On 8/7/2022 at 1:00 AM, OncomingStorm1984 said:

Do the "Multiplayer" sections in options.ini and mainscreen actually work or are they deprecated? I was hoping that I could hook the boys up to Hamachi and try a local LAN session.

While the multiplayer "components" are still a part of the SF2 (and FE2) code, the connection service that made everything work is long gone (was a part of older versions of Windows). See this helpful post for more info.

Cheers (and happy flying in single-player mode in the TW sims.),

Von S

Edited August 8, 2022 by VonS
Edited post.

[OncomingStorm1984 4]

8 hours ago, VonS said:

While the multiplayer "components" are still a part of the SF2 (and FE2) code, the connection service that made everything work is long gone (was a part of older versions of Windows). See this helpful post for more info.

Cheers (and happy flying in single-player mode in the TW sims.),

Von S

If LAN worked... so you're telling me all the code was stripped out?

And LAN will no longer work? NGL, I'd love to play multiplayer LAN, but...

[+VonS 1,423]

2 hours ago, OncomingStorm1984 said:

If LAN worked... so you're telling me all the code was stripped out?

And LAN will no longer work? NGL, I'd love to play multiplayer LAN, but...

Most of the code in SF2/FE2 (for multiplayer) is still there. The problem is that the Microsoft service (DirectPlay) that was necessary for MP to work disappeared sometime around Windows 7 and/or Windows Vista. Hamachi as far as I know does not work with SF2/FE2 so, theoretically, you would have to re-install and/or re-enable DirectPlay in Win7/8/8.1/10/11 in order to get MP working in SF2. DirectPlay, by the way, is required both for MP over the internet and for LAN. So, without DirectPlay, there is no LAN capability either. Here is a lengthy thread detailing a long (and failed) attempt to get DirectPlay working again in SF2 (as far as I could tell from the thread, it requires an awful lot of DLL editing and whatnot).

If you wish to experiment using some of the info. in that lengthy thread, recommended is to download the "dplay.dll" (DirectPlay driver that's missing from later vers. of Windows), unzip it, and pop it directly into the game folder for SF2 (not into the user mods folder) -- and then continue experimenting. (No guarantees however that any of that tinkering will work.) The missing DLL is available here (at dll-files.com), if you want to experiment with a possible, working LAN in SF2 -- unfortunately I can't offer any more info. since I abandoned bothering to tinker with MP in FE2 (in my case) yrs. ago -- it just wasn't worth the hassle.

Cheers,

Von S