Does the multiplayer work? It has been forever that I have seen this game. Does it do direct connect TCP/IP or LAN or what? Could I play with a buddy over hamachi?

Would like to know too, if it works it would be the main reason to buy this game in my case.

Tried it once, after 30 minutes in play, the client was forced out of the game after clicking the "I" for message log. Can't say much about what happened. At least there were no desync problems.

Thing is the multiplayer games cannot be saved. This means you have to play non-stop to the end, which can be between an hour or 3, if not more.

Does fragile have a DOS and a windows version? If so, which one did you use?

Since GOG launches DosBox, I'm guessing there is no Windows version of the game.

That's not the case. There's a Windows 95 version of it, too. I should know because I played it. :P I played the multiplayer of it for 10 years ago, or so, in Windows 95, but I cannot remember how well it ran with certainty. I do think I remember that I suffered from crashes, too, in the Windows version.

I got the windows version working in Windows XP a few years back, and yes, it was crashy. Back in the day though it worked fine as far as I can remember.

I found an interesting thread on another forum expanding on the multiplayer issues with this game.

Here: http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=17620&highlight=fragile

They're claiming to have played for over 20 hours without crashing ! There's a modified older version of dosbox attached in that thread on page 2. I haven't tried it myself, though. ;)

Here:

http://vogons.zetafleet.com/download.php?id=5287

Edit:

Just tried a quick game with the modified dosbox executable in multiplayer and no problem so far, but only played 15 mins.

There is a Multiplayer launcher from Gog, fairly straight forward to setup a local MP game up :)

After 30min it was still running, needs a proper run through Hamachi though.
//edit 1: tried running with hamachi, no luck. We tried it with modified configs - we got the IPXNET connect to work (the host could see my entry in his ipxnet status), but still no game. We have a botched setup though - will retry some later time (host: can't set port forwarding, i'm using DS-Lite which might be an issue [can't host])
//edit 2: tried again today, friend bought the game who has a Dual-Stack connection. It worked :) now only a longer-session test remains (no VPN, direct IPv4 connection with port-forwarding setup properly)
//edit 3: we did a ~4h session, my game sadly hanged itself two times. It seems to be a bad idea to click too furiously since i was the only one with the issue.

I was wondering, even though multi-player doesn't have a save option, couldn't you somehow save the entire state of two connected DOSBox instances + the data in the memory and then somehow reload a crashed multiplayer game that way?

what port do i need to port forward for it to work?