Quake, Quake II, Quake III and QuakeWorld

Servers list for all mentioned Quake games above:

https://www.quakeservers.net

Server list for Quake II only:

http://q2servers.com

Kali

"a legacy online gaming system"

Kali is a program that allows you to host/join games, if said game is on Kali's long list of compatible games.

I can't entirely confirm how well this works as every time I try to use it most of the chatrooms are dead and no one is hosting games. But if you need help installing this program there's this great Youtube tutorial here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa1NOBWIhHw

Download link:https://sites.google.com/kali.net/kalinet

The WON2 site isn't loading for me but that sounds like an interesting idea, would love to play some proper HLDM.

I was able to get Unreal Tournament up to date and join online games using that. It was a bit of a process, plenty of failed connections (possibly anti-cheat releated) but eventually I got into some games. That was fun 😀

Freelancer still has a lot of online mods and servers up.
Heroes of Might and Magic 3 "Horn of the Abyss" mod has its own netplay server and built in lobby, of course you can play classic RoE/AoB/SoD H3 maps online, and it's populated. Wrath of Gods ERA3 launcher also has netplay and lobby.

And Shadzilla mentioned UT, yeah UT99 still has alive netplay community.

There could be a few living major games from back in the day still alive via community servers, I think Starcraft has some.

This is all considering you want games with servers and lobbies. If you connect with likeminded people you can play anything that supports TCP/IP.
Most of the gaming back in the day was done this way.

Well I gave the WON2 patch a go this evening. Retail HL on Win98SE with all the pre-reqs, game updated to 1110 then their own 1112 update with the new server listing etc. All it does is crash when I go into 'Internet games'. I'd ask on their forums but they're offline.

Anyone got any suggestions? Happy to start another thread instead of maybe derailing this one.

Shadzilla wrote on 2024-07-15, 16:53:

Well I gave the WON2 patch a go this evening. Retail HL on Win98SE with all the pre-reqs, game updated to 1110 then their own 1112 update with the new server listing etc. All it does is crash when I go into 'Internet games'. I'd ask on their forums but they're offline.

Anyone got any suggestions? Happy to start another thread instead of maybe derailing this one.

Uninstall half-life and counter-strike off your machine then download this off archive.org REMOVED then install this and it should just work without having to patch. All you have to do is manually add the server using the in-game menu.

Maybe you could also try this for possibly working tunneling options with many additional games.

For Doom-engine games, RotT and Duke3D check out Fraggle's udpsetup. I take it you could also run sopwith with it.

Just bumping this because it's a great list. I've also been playing a lot of Ultima Online on the UO1998 shard, plays perfectly on my Win98 computer. Setup info for Win98 is on the discord in the #retro-computers channel, https://uo1998.com. Lots of people playing too

While I share the love of Ultima and Ultima Online, please do not bump threads on Vogons.

Diablo 1 servers still seem to be up on battle.net and you can connect and start a game no problem. Its a ghost town, though.