In the early nineties, a new way of playing games was introduced: network play. It was something I have never heard of before, because at that time I was just a teenager with only my game computer in my room without any connection to the outside world. It was unthinkable to me that computers could be connected with each other, sharing files, broadcasting messages… although networking was already introduced in big companies.

Christmas 1995, I had bought me 2 network cards, 2 BNC connectors, 2 T-pieces, 2 terminators & 5 meters of network cable.

Mission:

• Build a network between 2 computers to play Doom via the IPX protocol.

Challenges:

• Convince my parents, knowing I still was a teenager, to drill a hole through the wall between my brother’s room and my room, to be able to put the cable through 😉
• Knowing nothing about networking (cabling, connectors, cards, software installation, drivers), I finally achieved my goal to start up Doom with 2 players in a network game. I remember that my brother and I played every single level of Doom in cooperative play during the holidays of ‘95.

Starting from that memory, I wanted to build it again today in 2014 … So this video became a tutorial on how to setup an IPX network.