Dirt Cheap LAN for college?

[Aaron Harrelson]

My friends and I are trying to play a really old game that no longer has internet/multiplayer support outside of a LAN, and for some reason even though we are signed in to the same WIFI we haven't been able to make the LAN feature work (probably because it is college dorm WIFI, we all have different WIFI access passwords, there are so many different routers, and we don’t have any admin control to work out details), except for when I took my Ethernet cable from my PC and directly connected our laptops together. Our laptops only have one Ethernet port each however, so I figured unless I got some type of switch we wouldn't be able to do more than 2 player, and were tying to make up to 8 player work. (the game its self can do up to 12 player)

 

I looked up some switches and the large enough switches (8+ ports) are more than we are wiling to spend on a twenty year old game. Honestly we could probably rock an old CAT3 and be just fine, only thing I am not sure how to get around is that we only have one Ethernet port per laptop,

 

Is it possible to use USB to USB connection as the LAN? Cause we have plenty of USB ports and would only need to get a few extra USB cables for that. I assume not but figure its worth asking.

[SignatureSigner]

100mbit and gigabit switches with 8-24 ports are dirt cheap these days.

you can get an 8 port switch from under $30

 

would a cheap wifi ap work? travel routers can be under $30 and be set up for just a simple AP

[Electronics Wizardy]

Do they all have Wifi? I'd setup a wifi hotspot on on lapop and then everything can connct to that wifi

[Needfuldoer]

[ Moved to Networking ]

 

Any Ethernet switch with enough ports that you can get your hands on will do the job, even if it's a $5 clunker from a thrift store.

 

You could also do Internet Connection Sharing on one of your laptops, which turns it into a WiFi access point that the others can connect to.

 

12 minutes ago, Aaron Harrelson said:

for some reason even though we are signed in to the same WIFI we haven't been able to make the LAN feature work (probably because it is college dorm WIFI, we all have different WIFI access passwords, there are so many different routers, and we don’t have any admin control to work out details)

They have WiFi peer-to-peer connections disabled on the network.

[Aaron Harrelson]

maybe? we don't need actual internet, just a way to link all our laptops. since I already have a CAT 5E maybe I could just connect it to the AP and have all the other laptops connect to the AP. I assume the laptop hooked up to the AP would act as the Host and direct all traffic between the other laptops connected wirelessly to the AP?

[Aaron Harrelson]

do you think one laptop would be able to both run the old game and host all the other laptops through the hotspot?

 

were literally just looking at Warcraft 3. so I figure it would be fine?

We have some brand new laptops, some Mac, some Windows 10 and some Windows 11, we even have an old 2014? ThinkPad. I figure cross compatibility wouldn't be an issue because its just WIFI connections?

[Needfuldoer]

5 minutes ago, Aaron Harrelson said:

do you think one laptop would be able to both run the old game and host all the other laptops through the hotspot?

Absolutely. A network is a network, and Warcraft III is too new to require weird, non-TCP/IP protocols that came with DOS.

[Aaron Harrelson]

sweet! thank you.