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Christmas LAN party preparation

sircabulon

sircabulon

6502
Hey everyone,
I need some help figuring out how to make this happen. This year for my Christmas party at work, I want to setup a Net Trek and Wagon Trail 1848 network game between my IIci, Mac SE, Mac Classic, and Mac Color Classic. I know I will need to do the serial local talk, but my google-foo has brought me in circles and I am not sure what all I need at this point.
I remember as a kid hacking S-Video cables to make it work, but that was one to one. My dad had these RJ11 adapters and had a network to hook up to his printers and each other, but I never actually used them.
Is there any documentation readily available? I tried searching here, but couldn't find a guide or anything.
 
The easiest solution is the Farallon-style PhoneNet connectors (like your Dad used); serial on one side, and two RJ11 on the other; chain all the devices together via phone cabling. Those games should "just work" if it's all connected up and LocalTalk is enabled. Unlike Token Ring etc, PhoneNet just requires them to be connected, not in a ring. Of course, that assumes you have the hardware. https://handwiki.org/wiki/PhoneNet has links to the schematics if you want to build your own.

Of course, there's also https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?thr...ireless-plug-and-play-localtalk-dongle.43838/
 
Last edited:
@sircabulon What @adespoton said. PhoneNet was invented by BMUG and commercialized by Farallon (arguably the commercial arm of BMUG) as a cheap alternative to the expensive proprietary AppleTalk cable and adapters Apple was offering at the time. It also allowed companies to use existing phone lines in their buildings for networking. Pretty cool. :)

It was one of the most popular networking standards for a while because it was also one of the cheapest and easy to implement.

If you're searching on eBay for some adapters, search for both "AppleTalk" and "PhoneNet," the terms were used interchangeably. However, double check the adapter has the phone jack and not the AppleTalk (s-video) connector.

I would also highly recommend Bolo if you want to do a tank MMO. With 4 machines you could do a 1v1v1v1 or a 2v2.

And if you have a vintage PC, you could also throw up a game of Amor Alley. One of the rare early cross-platform games.
 
olePigeon said:
@sircabulon What @adespoton said. PhoneNet was invented by BMUG and commercialized by Farallon (arguably the commercial arm of BMUG) as a cheap alternative to the expensive proprietary AppleTalk cable and adapters Apple was offering at the time. It also allowed companies to use existing phone lines in their buildings for networking. Pretty cool. :)

It was one of the most popular networking standards for a while because it was also one of the cheapest and easy to implement.

If you're searching on eBay for some adapters, search for both "AppleTalk" and "PhoneNet," the terms were used interchangeably. However, double check the adapter has the phone jack and not the AppleTalk (s-video) connector.

I would also highly recommend Bolo if you want to do a tank MMO. With 4 machines you could do a 1v1v1v1 or a 2v2.

And if you have a vintage PC, you could also throw up a game of Amor Alley. One of the rare early cross-platform games.
Click to expand...
Bolo, Strategic Conquest and Spectre were my go-tos -- partially because they'll work with anything back to a Plus (possibly also a 512Ke). Also NetTrek and NetRisk, but they're really not as fun.
 
These are all great suggestions! Thank you! I got some phone net adapters, and have plenty of computers, but I am short on keyboards and mice currently. Hopefully I can score another wombat or similar soon because I don't think I will have my keyboard I am working on anywhere near done in time.

So far here is the line up.
Mac Color Classic (32Mhz Max1zzz accelerator)
Mac SE FD/HD (16Mhz Radius accelerator)
Powerbook 180
Mac IIci (40Mhz Bolle accelerator

I am not sure how the color/black and white part will play out yet.
 
I have run into issues where the telephone wire used to connect from one PhoneNet to another didn’t work. I think you need a 4 wire phone cord to do it. Also, both ends of the PhoneNet adapter chain need to have one of those terminators I believe.

IMG_0684.jpegIt
 
RJ14 wire should have 4 wires. It's generally the most common, but if you use RJ11 2 pin wire, it's not going to work because that's only Tip 1 and Ring 1, which PhoneNET doesn't use.

See the link below for more. It has a pretty good dive into PhoneNET.
 
Yes, you need RJ14 and the terminators (although you can make up a set of terminators pretty easily based on that photo alone). You also need to ensure that you aren't using a TX/RX crossover cable (I used to have one of my RJ14 cables crossed for direct computer-to-computer serial communication -- doesn't work with PhoneNET).
 
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