I purchased two copies of DS II, and am trying to initiate LAN play between
the two machines (separated by a 3-Com 10/100 switch). Everything works up to
the point of actually launching the server to host the game (staging area,
game setup, single-player, etc.) at which point the guest machine shows the
server starting (but stays in the staging area) and the server switches to a
black screen with only the mouse pointer working. Seems to be consistent and
re-installation did not affect it. This happens regardless of which machine
hosts (the host machine is the one that locks up on the black screen of
doom). The machine is not frozen, you can alt-tab out and kill DS II.

Windows Firewall is disabled and oddly, Each machine can join/play an
internet (already hosted) games just fine. Not really interested in that
aspect, we bought it really for LAN play. The machines are both Windows XP
SP2, DirectX 9.0c, 1 GB ram. I have applied the 2.1 patch (hoping against
hope) but this didn;t really change the symptoms any,

I am having the same problem and no luck solving it. Please let me
know if you find a solution first.

Drew


mark wrote:
> I purchased two copies of DS II, and am trying to initiate LAN play between
> the two machines (separated by a 3-Com 10/100 switch). Everything works up to
> the point of actually launching the server to host the game (staging area,
> game setup, single-player, etc.) at which point the guest machine shows the
> server starting (but stays in the staging area) and the server switches to a
> black screen with only the mouse pointer working. Seems to be consistent and
> re-installation did not affect it. This happens regardless of which machine
> hosts (the host machine is the one that locks up on the black screen of
> doom). The machine is not frozen, you can alt-tab out and kill DS II.
>
> Windows Firewall is disabled and oddly, Each machine can join/play an
> internet (already hosted) games just fine. Not really interested in that
> aspect, we bought it really for LAN play. The machines are both Windows XP
> SP2, DirectX 9.0c, 1 GB ram. I have applied the 2.1 patch (hoping against
> hope) but this didn;t really change the symptoms any,

Got the solution today,

just run the following:

regsvr32 dpnet.dll

This will reregister the direct play modem/network interface. This was
(apparently) corrupted and causing the hang when it switched into multiplayer
mode.

I was certain the connectivity was good since the ping was good in the
staging area (green bar by player/party name) and the machines could 'see'
each other via TCP/IP.