Dumb question - direct link cable

[Action_Johnson]

I'm helping my 12yr old nephew put together his first PC. He's accumulated a few parts, but around Christmas, he'll have everything and we're going to assemble it together (more like he'll assemble it, I'll just tell him where stuff goes and in which order)

 

Anyway, when it's up and running, I was thinking we could do a 2-person LAN party and play some co-op games. I haven't been to a LAN party in over 15 years, and I remember sometimes when it was just me and one other person, we had the yellow crossover cable.

 

Is that still a thing? Or would I need to buy a switch and ethernet cables to do this one-time LAN party with my nephew? I have an extra wi-fi card I can slip into the 2nd PCI-E 16x slot on my motherboard so we could be in the same room.

 

Last time I did anything serious with networking, I was still using Windows 2000, so "rusty" would be an understatement. 

[aDoomGuy]

You simply don't have a multi-modem or wireless router or something like that? If you do just connect to that like normal and make sure all machines have set the network to private. If you don't have that a switch should work fine.

[Oshino Shinobu]

Crossover cables are mostly obsolete now, a normal ethernet cable will be fine and the NIC will be able to auto detect if it need to switch which pins data is sent on to act like a crossover. 

 

Worst case, a cheap gigabit switch and a pair of ethernet cables will work fine and shouldn't cost much more than £20, if that. 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

38 minutes ago, Action_Johnson said:

Anyway, when it's up and running, I was thinking we could do a 2-person LAN party and play some co-op games. I haven't been to a LAN party in over 15 years, and I remember sometimes when it was just me and one other person, we had the yellow crossover cable.

 

As @Oshino Shinobusaid, you can use either cable now, but the main problem you may find is with game selection: it will work for older games, and a minority of new ones, but many games will require (often needlessly) to go through their servers anyway for multiplayer, making it a matter of getting both machines to the internet.

But hopefully you have a nice, LAN-capable game in mind

[Action_Johnson]

OK this is all good info. I have an Airport Extreme at my house that I could take with me. I didn't think about the internet access part. 15 years ago you didn't need to do that lol

 

I might just pop in one of my extra 802.11ac cards and go with that so we can both have internet access to auth whatever we're playing. Bummer.