The Network Party (General Comments on Networking)

Member Name: rob_writer

Product:	General Comments on Networking
Date:	08/08/01 (350 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fun, Easy

Disadvantages: None

Picture the scene. My friends and I (note the good English!) have just finished our A-levels, and have about 3 months free to have some fun. One of your friends parents go away, and he decides to have a party. But this is no normal party, this is a network party!

It may sound a little sad to most people, but it's actually quite a lot of fun. Computer games you see, that's the reason! A lot of the computer game doubters say that they are an anti-social affair, but that could not be further from the truth. Computer games are better when played with or against another person, but unfortunately for us PC gamers the chance to do this is not all that common. The internet does allow you to play against others, but the slow speed of a normal 56K modem limits the type of game you can play, and the speed at which you can play it. The answer lies in a network!

The idea of a network is simple, although the practicalities of setting one up can be a little harder! A network connects a number of computers together, allowing them to share information and resources. This means that you can share things like printers, and CD-ROM drives, of if one person has some files that another person wants they can be transferred across the network.

Of course, networks are of great importance in places like offices, where a central server can be linked to a number of workstations. The server holds all the information, so that any user can access their work from any workstation. The internet is just a massive version of a smaller network, but what I'm concerned with here is a network called a LAN, which is used for home/office use and is what we use to play games over!

The kit you need is pretty simple, although there are various ways that you can go about things.

If you just want to hook up two PC's for a bit of head to head gaming you can use a standard parallel or serial cable which fits between any two PC's. You can then run a p
rogram that comes with Windows called direct cable connection and you should be able to access each others PC's and more importantly, play games. In reality I have always found direct cable connection a little hit and miss, working when and if it feels like it.

For more than one PC you are going to need some extra kit for your PC, what are known as Network cards (or NICs - Network Interface Cards). There are all sorts of different cards, cables and ways to network depending on what, and how fast you want to do things. The most common types of card are 10/100 combo cards, which offer a circular (BNC) slot for 10Base5 networks and square holes for 100BaseTX networks (forgive me if I confused any names, have you seen how many there are!!). Basically, the 100Mbit networks require extra equipment which are known as hubs. A hub is like a train station, taking all the incoming data and sending it out on the correct route, but because of their extra expense we don't bother with them. A 100Mbit network will offer speeds upwards of 10 megabytes per second which is VERY VERY fast.

Normally we use a 10Mbit per second peer to peer network. This uses co-axial cable (similar to the wire used in TV aerials) to connect the computers in a chain, with the cable going from the network card of one PC to the next PC, in a long chain. At the two ends of the network you need what are known as terminators, which complete the loop of the network and let the network know that there are no more PC's to come in the line. Along the chain of PC's T-pieces are used to connect to the PC's. This is a T shaped connector with three connections, one of which plugs in to the PC with the other two have cables joining to the other PC's.

Setting up a network to work on PC's is a fairly easy task, although it is often a case of trying a lot of different settings until it starts to work. There are sets of protocol which must you use to talk to other P
C's, but saying as we're using Windows the usual set of protocols to use are those made by Microsoft. Installing the correct protocols and putting all your PC's in the same Workgroup should be enough to let you 'see' each other on the network, although depending on what Operating Systems you use (i.e. 95,98,ME,NT,2000 or XP) you may find it difficult to get everything working well. It's well worth you all using the same operating system during the networking to simply make things easier. It's one of those occasions where everything should be fine whatever OS you use, but as so often happens this isn't the case.

The type of network we used runs at just over 1Mb per second, which is very fast considering that a 56K modem downloads at 5kb per second at best (remembering 1Mb = 1024Kb). It's more than fast enough to play games against each other or to share files over the network.

Even better is that it's cheap too. A netword card is only around £10-£20 and the cables and terminators are only a few pounds.

Once you've got your network up and running (budget a few hours for this) you need to get down to same game playing, and although it really isn't quite appropriate here I'm going to tell you a few good ones to try......

On the shoot 'em front there are the old favourites Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, as well as the more strategic Counter Strike mod for Half Life. Red Alert 2 takes the top strategy game prize, while Star Wars Episode One Racer proves a surprisingly exciting game to play. Championship Manager is good for the footy fans and Grand Theft Auto is worth it for the nostalgia value! A surprisingly good network pastime is to play a SNES emulator called SNES9x which allows you to play multiplayer SNES games on your PC's. This isn?t the time or place to go in to emulators, but for anyone interested there is a SNES9x category on Dooyoo!

So overall, a network
party is a great way to have fun. Run it over the course of a few days, and mix in the more usual pursuits such as films, food and drink and you can't fail to have a good time!

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