Me and a coworker spent the best part of the morning trying to get the multiplayer working on LAN (ethernet & wifi) on OS X, Windows & even linux (using dosbox). We've tried everything but game just gets stuck on hourglass when trying to connect to a session.

...are you sure that this works?!

Sorry to bump this but I am using YANG to try and get connected and the game loads up but on my client computer it says that "timeout connecting to server at <ip address>. Does anyone have a solution for this?

Hi, are you trying to play the game on just LAN or over the Internet?

If it's just LAN only, then you won't need to forward any ports.

If it's over the Internet, only the person hosting the game should forward ports.

You also need to make sure "netbios.exe" gets loaded through DOSBox.

The YANG website doesn't have a guide for the GOG Edition yet, only the CD version, so I have gone to buy the GOG Edition on their main website to try it.

I have found the installation to be allot different from the CD version of the game, and have found it to be a bit different to setting it up over YANG (Yet Another Netplay Guider).

Here is a video of me getting it to work over YANG, using the GOG Edition.

I made a few errors in the video, and I will maybe make a new one sometime later, for the main YANG Website, or and maybe a guide modification to include the GOG Edition as well.

Anyways this is what I found out using the GOG Edition so far, and got it to work - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prhMA0TLFNw

Hey Replica,

Thanks so much for getting back to me and I really appreciate your help in getting my game to work. Your video is extremely helpful too!

I am trying to do an internet game. I have followed your advice with port forwarding.

Initially, I thought you had to run the NETHERW.EXE in network mode. For example NETHERW.EXE -network (at least that's how DOSBOX needs to run the exe file if you were to type it in DOSBOX). It seems like you don't have to do this when you're connecting to this way.

There's a few things I had not actually done. The first one was extracting the files out of the game.ins file. That was the biggest obstacle for me because yang needs a direct .exe file. PowerISO really helps with this. Thanks for sharing that.

I will try this with a friend tomorrow and let you know how I go.

I'll probably try later again too, but in Internet mode, and I did notice it uses a command line such as -network as well, but unsure what that does.

It is just after netherw.exe is typed in the .conf file for the GOG version.

Hey Replica. Thanks for your outstanding help once again with the video and all.

The issue with my timing out was being caused by a couple of problems: '

The Dosbox version that comes with Magic Carpet 2 is a very restricted version and is not compatible running any form of multiplayer connections. I downloaded Dosbox 0.74 on it's own and used that and it seemed to work. I also allowed Dosbox through my firewall just to make sure. I think primarily it was that version of Dosbox that was causing the problem. In your video, you use the full version of Dosbox not the one that comes with Magic Carpet 2.

Now that I have it on my laptop, I will try to connect with a friend and see how that goes over the internet.

I had a go at getting it to work online with the GOG Edition using YANG - Yet Another Netplay Guider that is a netplay launcher that helps players advertise their game rooms on a server so people can easily join them.

It's important to also know that, making sure that inside the game the "Sky" and "Reflections" are off by pressing the D button to disable them in the menu to prevent a crash that can happen at anytime during your game some of the times.

I think the GOG Edition has them off by default.

The game doesn't seem to ever crash with those options off, so far.

You can also use the R key to go to a better resolution that looks nicer without problems.

And here is a video using the GOG version, setting it up for Multiplayer purposes with YANG - https://youtu.be/RW4UEOgZkYs.

And you get to see the game actually connect over the internet, with a ping of around 50ms that was quite playable.

Again sadly this game I think wasn't designed to be played over the Internet, but it can be played over the internet, just maybe not with players with a higher ping way over past 50ms, but you can try.

So I recommend playing someone in the same country as you or not to far, with 50ms or lower ping as a guide only.

LAN games will be great no doubt.

The GOG edition has a shortcut "DOSBox Configuration", to alter some settings to improve the performance of your DOSBox. That's one of the things I haven't altered much in the video.

On YANG (Yet Another Netplay Guider) - you can use a DOSBox configuration file as a base.

For those that would like to try YANG the main website is - http://yang-online.com.

If you are just using the GOG Edition to play online, it comes with a "Launch Multiplayer" shortcut that allows you to enter the IP address manually to play someone over the Internet or just over your LAN.

If using the GOG Edition only without YANG, it will use the default port for the DOSBox HOST port UDP 213 that you can forward if acting as the server the HOST, joiners won't have to forward the port.

YANG by default uses TCP port 8501 for the room hoster, and the UDP port 23513 by default for the DOSBox IPX Server.

Thanks for your detailed help once again, Replica. It is really good to see the lengths you are going to make sure there is a solution for internet games for everyone. I agree with this. It is just good that we have the capability of forcing it to play an internet game. However, if you don't mind a slow game and your internet is good, you can still play with someone with like a 300ms ping between you and them. Any pings over 400 though may become too unplayable for you.

I safely played with a mate from the UK when I live in Australia. Yeah it was a slow game, but we still managed! (I'm used to it since when I used to play this game when I was four, it was relatively slow but not too slow to be uncomfortable) You will want to make sure you close off any other programs that may be using up your bandwidth in this situation though for maximum performance.

This is all using YANG of course. I'm not sure what it would be like using the GOG Edition to connect if that is even possible. But does the GOG Edition without YANG for multiplayer work? They have this restricted version of Dosbox which times out. I have not tried port forwarding that UDP though, maybe that's my problem. Please let me know if this actually works because after all the trouble I've gone through, I've actually told GOG Customer Support that their version of Dosbox with multiplayer for this game needs to be updated to the full version of Dosbox (lol).

It should work as the DOSBox version shouldn't be different than the one on the main DOSBox website.

In the last video I used the DOSBox that came with the installation package (GOG Edition).

Just that the HOST would need to forward one port when creating the game, that would be UDP 213 for it to work if using only the (GOG Edition) to play over the internet.

As through DOSBox, if you don't tell it what port you want to use, it uses the default port 213.

Using the GOG "Launch Multiplayer" shortcut, you would enter the persons HOST IP address manually to join them into the box they have created.

If the HOST doesn't know their internet IP address, they should be able to find it by visiting this website - https://www.whatismyip.com/.

I found that when you left click the multiplayer icon on the main menu and then changed the default value of 0 to something else (0-9 are the accepted values) before pressing the checkmark the game will start the multiplayer session successfully.

I'm not sure why but it did not seem to like being set to the default value of 0 when I was running it.

Hello,
the game version of gog.com is pretty nice prepared for network game. You only need to do two things:
1) Use prepared configuration file for multilayer game
2) Change your IP adress.

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Add 1) Look into instalarion folder: c:\GOG Games\Magic Carpet 2\. You will see several config files:
dosboxMagicCarpet2.conf
dosboxMagicCarpet2_client.conf
dosboxMagicCarpet2_server.conf
dosboxMagicCarpet2_single.conf

One PC will be server, the others will be clients.

How to use config file:
Click with right mouse button to Magic Carpet icon on your windows desktop. Click to properties. You wil see something like this:
"C:\GOG Games\Magic Carpet 2\DOSBOX\DOSBox.exe" -conf "..\dosboxMagicCarpet2.conf" -conf "..\dosboxMagicCarpet2_single.conf" -noconsole -c "exit"

on server PC change it to:
"C:\GOG Games\Magic Carpet 2\DOSBOX\DOSBox.exe" -conf "..\dosboxMagicCarpet2.conf" -conf "..\dosboxMagicCarpet2_server.conf" -noconsole -c "exit"

on clients change it to
"C:\GOG Games\Magic Carpet 2\DOSBOX\DOSBox.exe" -conf "..\dosboxMagicCarpet2.conf" -conf "..\dosboxMagicCarpet2_client.conf" -noconsole -c "exit"

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add2)
Maybe you will need to change IP adress in the client config file. Open tne dosboxMagicCarpet2_client.conf file. Change 127.0.0.1 to your IP adress of your server PC.