My kids are beginning to play on their computers, and when one of them where invited to a socalled LAN-Party it woke up memories in my mind. I remembered how I used to play at LAN parties my self, and I remembered how simple it was to set up a game and play against each others. Todays gaming is all about joining public servers, creating accounts, and answering questions about this and that.

That made me think back on one of my favourite games from around 2000, Re-Volt. I searched the web and found that Re-Volt isn’t dead at all, fan communities are still alive, and theres even a small patch for the latest version that will support modern wide screens, easier multiplayer, etc. Check it out here: http://www.revoltrace.net/ where you will also be able to download the latest version and patch.

The kids are running Windows 7 and Windows 10 and we had no issues installing it, the installer will ask for the directplay module and download it when needed. In order to play multiplayer we had to allow some firewall ports to be used even though the firewall is disabled on the local network. When hosting a game I noticed that it’s using my public IP and not my private, thats probably why I had to allow additional ports to be used – 🙁

Now, lets get back to the actual point for my post. I am running Ubuntu Linux 14.04 on my laptop, and I thought I would be able to play Re-Volt using Wine. No problem at all, it installed just fine and worked like a charm, until I wanted to play multiplayer over the LAN. I got different erros depending if I wanted to host or join a game, but quickly I found out that on Linux I also needed the so-called directplay module, which is easily installed with winetricks that comes with the Wine installation on my system. After some googling I found out that all I needed to do was:

winetricks directplay

This command will install the directplay module and now the game is running smoothly with or without multiplayer. Wine documentation states to run “sh winetricks directplay” which will not work for the package-manager installed version.