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Network Game Hosting, PC Modems, & Old Hard Drives Greetings, everyone. This week we talk about connecting PC modems to Macs, serving games from behind a routed and shared connection, and discuss what to do with the old hard drive you just upgraded in your laptop! If you have a question of your own, you can e-mail me, or ask in the comments below. Alternatively, you can visit the new and improved Tech Support forums and let everyone take a stab at answering your questions! For now, read on and enjoy!
Yes, Mark, it should work fine, assuming the Mac has a serial port. Typically external PC modems will have an RS-232, 25-pin, port on them. Just get a cable from a mini-din-8 port to RS-232 and you should be fine. Of course, if you don't have a serial port (most new Macs don't), then you'll need a USB to serial adapter like the Keyspan USB Twin Serial Adapter to make this work.
Yeah, it's your base station. When you host a game, people need to be able to generate "unsolicited" connections to the computer you're hosting on. If that computer is behind a router, the router needs to be told what to do. We use the "Port Mapping" features of the router to accomplish this. I did some reading and, according to PracticallyNetworked.com, Unreal Tournament uses the following ports:
So, in theory, all you'd need to do to make an Unreal Tournament server work would be to tell your Airport router to map UDP ports 7777 through 7781 to your server machine, and you're good to go. However, Apple's Airport Base Station only lets you map TCP ports at this time, so what you want to do is impossible. :-( Web sharing, on the other hand, is most definitely possible. The default port for http traffic is TCP port 80. That can easily be mapped using the Airport Admin utility and you should be good to go.
In a nutshell, you'll need to buy an external case for the drive and find a way to connect it to your machine. That drive is an IDE drive, and your computer has USB and SCSI ports. Since getting an IDE drive to work on a SCSI port is darn near impossible, we should focus on USB. There are a few USB-only kits out there, but I would recommend buying one that has some future potential and includes FireWire as well. To do this, you can get a kit like the 2.5" Spark II Enclosure Kit that Firewire Direct sells (currently US$119), and that's all you need. It has both USB and FireWire interfaces on it, and should let you use that drive without any headache (you could also pop one of those 20GB Travelstars in there for a real treat down the road!). One thing, be sure to check this page at XLR8YourMac.com -- it has some very important information regarding the process you're about to perform. That's it for today, folks! Feel free to send your questions to me at [email protected], or ask in the new Tech Support forums. I'll see you in a few weeks! PS. Have a Nice Day. |