However, I had lost contact with neon, immure and warmfusion (well not so much warmfusion but I hadn’t spoken to him for ages, and hadn’t seen him since uni – have seen him once recently though, was great catching up!).  There are quite a few others but I don’t even know how to get back in contact with them… yet.

Anyway, to stop this trend and to revitalise old friendships I started to systematically restore Comscare to it’s former glory.  The first step I took was setting up a forum at http://forum.comscare.org/.  Even though we didn’t have a forum before, I figured it was the first logical step since a lot of Comscarians may be restricted from IM in work and it’s rather tricky to block the web .  The next step was to set up the old blog aggregator, which is almost done now and lives at http://blog.comscare.org/.  I did a little web-surfing, trying to find old blogs and hook up their feeds but not many of us have blogs anymore (hopefully the aggregator will compel some old Comscarians to start blogging again).  I also hooked up some Twitter feeds to the blog site.

I may even set up an IRC server for us to chat on but I’m not sure how many Comscarians would idle there as they may be restricted the same way they are for IM.

Anyway, if you’re a Comscarian that I haven’t mentioned, make yourself known and contact me and I’ll hook you up with a forum account so you can join in on the discussions   Who knows what may come… Comscare Tournament 2009/10?

However, when we got around to installing and setting up a multiplayer game, we instantly ran into some problems.  None of us could actually get to the Network lobby while using the IPX/SPX compatible protocol.

“Ahh!  Got to add the protocol to the network connection.” I remembered since we had formatted since we got our new machines.  So we added said protocol and tried again to no avail.  Slightly frustrated, we checked Google for the issue to see if it was common and what the fix was.

To shock horror we discovered that the IPX/SPX protocol was not going to have a complete implementation for 64bit Windows machines since it is a legacy protocol and the one provided was a dummy protocol.  This literally blew our gaming session out of the water and we spent ages hunting around for any solution at all.  Unfortuantely, there were none.

So, a year and a bit down the line and the withdrawal is beginning to resurface (probably after the complete tripe that was C&C 3) and in one of our eternal dilemmas on which game to play Tiberian Sun managed to pop-up again.  Then we remembered why we never got around to playing it before.  But that was over a year ago and the great thing about computer games and addictions is that at least one person in the world won’t stop till they succeed where many others have failed.

Back to Google we went.  It took less than 5 minutes to find NOT an IPX/SPX protocol driver for 64bit Windows, but a Tiberian Sun & Red Alert 2 LAN patch that changed the game from using IPX for LAN games to UDP instead!  Absolute genius!  The guy that wrote this is a legend and deserves a ton of credit and kudos for this, this has effectively brought back a couple of the best RTSes out there (I’m surprised EA didn’t do this when they re-released the game, they really should have tested it but obviously they only give a crap about money, as long as it sold… it didn’t have to actually work).

Anyway, enough babbling, here it is:
http://www.understorm.net/cnc/lan/ts_ra2.php

Just discovered he also has the C&C1 and RA1 fix on his site too at:
http://www.understorm.net/cnc/lan/cnc95_ra1.php

Game on!