I have 3 computers which I would like to connect via LAN. One is a Windows XP machine and the other two are Windows 7, 64-bit versions. All of them have Railroad Tycoon II Platinum Edition installed on them. I have checked to ensure all firewalls involved are permitting Railroad Tycoon II-related traffic onto the network, but the situation remains that in TCP/IP mode the XP machine can't "see" the game to join if either Windows 7 machine hosts it, the Windows 7 machines crash if they attempt to join a game created by the XP machine, and the Windows 7 machines also crash when they try to join games started by each other?

Please could someone advise me how to get them to connect to each other to play Railroad Tycoon II together? Am I missing some pre-requisite, or is there some other complication of which I should be aware, peculiar to this game? (Civilization III, for example, works fine between all three computers, and that is of similar vintage). I gather from other forum posts that at least one other person has managed it, but there were no details about what conditions were involved. Even getting 2 of them to play together would be pretty nice.

First of all, make sure the game is in all computers' exception lists in the firewall/antivirus programs.

In case anyone is having the same problem...allowing the game exe is not enough. It also needs "Microsoft Directplay Helper" enabled in the firewalls.