herecomethe2000: Some of you may know that Tyrian 2.1 had a multiplayer option over ipx or modem/nullmodem. However, when they made tyrian 2000 they removed that portion of the game leaving us to make the decision of either going with 2.1 with network multiplayer or t2000 with the 5th chapter. Now how about we all have our cake and eat it?

Now following this old thread

http://tyrian2k.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=multiplayer&action=display&thread=139&page=1

zellsf pretty much did all the leg work and found out that you could copy some files from the 2.1 shareware!?!? version to get the multiplayer portion into t2k. And then use this backdoor command to get into the Epic Games Arena

netipx netarena -l 1 file0001

He even later pointed out which files were required under it. He was wrong however in the game needing the 2.1 .exe for multi as the 2k one works fine when called "tyrian.exe". Fortunately, when gog released their 2k version they relabeled "tyrian2k.exe" to just tyrian.exe This has a helpful benefit to us all as it will remove confusion later down the road when we have multiplayer with the 5th episode and not have to rename mission files.

I took the liberty of putting the missing 2.1 shareware files into a zip file and with a multi.bat containing the backdoor command
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So to get this working

1) setup the GoG version of Tyrian2000

2) Download this zip file containing the missing multi files from the shareware version
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50486448/T2kMulti.zip

3) extract the missing files into the tyrian2k data folder

4) launch dosbox and connect to another dosbox via the ipx emulation:
ipx true
ipxnet startserver [udp port] or ipxnet connect <IP> [UDP port]

5) launch multi.bat to start up the Epic Mega Games Arena

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For mac "boxer" users

1)download the zip above

2)right click on Tyrian 2000.app

3)Go to Contents ->Resources->Right click on "Tyrian 2000.boxer" -> C.harddisk and extract the data there

4)Open muti.bat with textedit and type "call network" (no quotes) on a line before "netipx netarena -l 1 file0001"

5) then go up one file directory to the Tyrian 2000.boxer folder where you will find "Game Info.plist" and open it with textedit (xcode will work too, but it's overkill)

6) After you see <array> in the <BXLaunchers> section add

<dict>
<key>BXLauncherTitle</key>
<string>Tyrian Multiplayer</string>
<key>BXLauncherPath</key>
<string>C.harddisk/multi.bat</string>
</dict>

This will add the multiplayer option to the Boxer launcher where it will give you a psudo graphical interface for making the dosbox emu ipx connection to another dosbox.

7) Have fun!