m not a huge video game person, but a buddy of mine is begging me to get an xbox so we can play games 1,000 miles apart.

I'd really like to know how it works with my DSL before I buy it. I do not want to mess up my mac connectivity for an Xbox.

What I'm wondering is this. Right now I have a netgear router. Can I just have my wireless network "discover" the xbox as it does with other stuff? Like for example, I bought a Palm Tungsten C and all I did was type in the Address into my router setup and it worked. Is Microsoft much harder to deal with in that way?

Does anyone know anything about this type of configuration?

I don't have DSL but this is what I used to connect my Xbox:

You have to let the Xbox discover the router. Once you connect the wireless adapter to the Xbox, you would have to go into the setup options menu on your xbox, and let it know how you connect to your wireless network. For example, my Airport Extreme base station has WEP enabled. The xbox would need to know the key in order to connect. It took me only 5 minutes to connect. No problems at all.

I'm using the microsoft xbox wireless adapter. It was on sale a few months ago at Best Buy for $70. The normal price is usually $99.

Ok here is the deal scott. I don't play games but there is only one way that this can work. The xbox is configured to connect to a LAN or WAN via DHCP. Therefore you need to make sure that you have DHCP enabled on the router. There may be another way of doing it that would enable your LAN to be more secure, but if you don't know how to hook up the xbox, I won't go into all of that. Give that a try and tell me how it goes. You will have to make sure that you enable it on the router, if it is not already done. Check your mac's configuration to see how it obtains an ip. If it gets an ip via DHCP, then plug up the xbox and play away.

Recently released software by Postpose
http://www.postpose.com/aquaduct/two

Apparently allows tunnelling thru your Mac's Broadband connection to play directly on the Net
- Apparently like XboX Live in that it tricks Xbox into thinking it's playing on a Lan configuration but actually over the Net but free! - so you and your friend should be able to link up your IPs

hth

Post edited by: Pretzel, at: 2004/06/06 17:39

Post edited by: Pretzel, at: 2004/06/06 17:40

I've had a few friends setup xboxes behind routers and they had trouble connecting to each other by default. The two ways we discovered to fix the problem is to either place the xbox in the DMZ if your router supports that or enable port forwarding to the xbox for the ports that is uses to connect to the other systems. I forgot what port that is by default by a quick google search should find it for you.

the software that allows an xbox to direct connect to another xbox via the mac requires a mac on BOTH ends. It may not be true anymore, but when I first read about this program that is what it said.

Well, the one important thing that I didn't mention here is that I don't have the xbox yet. I'm figuring this part out before I buy it. I'm weird that way. :P

1 word for u - Halo

halo 2 is coming out, woo-woo, so get yur xbox in advance and be ready by playing halo 1.

My friends are most into sports games, but I hear Halo rocks. I think I could get into that! I and II.