Interesting game issue. Any ideas?

Phandalyon

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Joined
Jun 12, 2001
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Hey guys. Just was at a LAN party a week or so ago and ran into an interesting issue. We always like to play a few rounds of old school Need For Speed 3 because of the wide selection of cars available. Never had any problems until last time. There were 8 computers at the party, and 3 of them would not network.

All computers had the same patch and program installed.
Here are the basic HW configs for all of the PCs.

Working PCs:

WPC1
Abit KT7-A Motherboard
Athlon 1000 Proc.
512MB PC133 SDRAM
Radeon 7000 64MB
Windows 2000 SP4 with all updates

WPC2
Old HP
Pentium 2 300
384 MB RAM
Diamond Viper V330 16MB
Windows 2000 SP4

WPC3
MSI Motherboard
AMD Athlon 900
512MB RAM
ATI RAGE Pro 16MB
Windows 2000 SP4

WPC4
Sager Laptop
P4 3.0
512MB Dual Channel DDR
Onboard video (Intel I think)
Windows XP SP2

WPC5:
Sager Laptop
P4 2.8
512MB RAM
Radeon 9600 Pro (Mobile)
Windows XP SP1

Non working PCs

NPC1:
Sager Laptop
P4 3.2
512MB RAM (Dual Channel DDR)
Radeon 9700 256MB (mobile)
Windows XP SP2

NPC2:
MSI Mobo
AMD Sempron 2200
512MB Dual Channel DDR
Radeon 7000 64MB
Windows 2000 SP4

NPC3 (My computer)
Gigabyte GASINXP1394 mobo
Pentium 4 2.4C
1GB RAM (Dual Channel)
Radeon 9600 Pro 256MB
Windows XP SP2

We had 3 switches set up for the night. 1 Gigabit and 2 10/100s. Each of the non-working computers was plugged into a different switch. Changing the cabling around or the ports or the locations did not change anything. Going wireless had no effect either. There is nothing really in common among the 3 non-working computers that the working computers do not also share. 5 of the the listed computers are ones that I own. The one I listed as my computer is my main work computer and the one I always use.

All of the computers could play the game just fine. But if you went to host or join a TCP LAN game, nothing would happen. You would click host or join and the menu that is supposed to come up just never does.

I know its an older game, but we do enjoy playing it. Does anyone have any ideas on this? Its a great game for those people with older computers to enjoy and still a fun game on a fast computer.

If I think of anything else I will add it later.

I have easy access to both working and non-working systems, so I can try anything.

I have tried reinstalling the game and redoing all the network settings.

I should also note that the computers that were not workings were able to access both the internet and other computers on the network without issue. In fact my computer (NPC3) has its My Documents directory mapped to my file server (WPC1)

Thanks guys.
 
I forgot to mention that. All firewalls, virus scanners, pop up blockers, ad blockers, etc were killed.

I know most of them would not effect it, but I tried shutting them all off anyway. I even went so far as to uninstall all of them.
 
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