Alright - let me first just apologize for the like of this post - in retrospect it isn't that helpful. Hopefully the next few lines are more clear. Here is my deal. I and many of my friends love the game Age of Empires II and its expansion. Using the latest CVS from transgaming's project Cedega (formerly known as winex) I was able to get the game running adequately in linux, with just a few minor font irritations. Nothing to stop the game from being fully playable. The problem here is this - AOEII uses directplay 6 for its multi-player support. For me and 8 other people this little game keeps windoze on our hard disks. We would all gladly wipe it away if we could just get multi-player working. I have searched the net for hours upon hours. At first it was disappointing. Both wine and cedega(winex) have minimal if any support for directplay. There was little talk of spurring its development, and no apparant project to complete its implementation. It seemed a wasted effort. Sad times. Then, when all seemed lost, I came across an intersting project. The DirectPlay Masquerading Module appeared to be the answer to my problems. Posts even reported using Age of Empires II with it with no problems - the exact game I wish to play. I eagerly downloaded it and attempted to compile it. Unfortunately this error appeared: Configure the kernel before compiling the module.
Hmmm - seems straightforeward enough... but configure it for what? Readme files were no help. Then I noted on the website, that it was only for the 2.2 linux kernel. And I use a 2.4 kernel and a 2.6 kernel (choose at boot). I don't really want to have to add a 2.2 kernel to it too, as most every module I have isn't compiled for it and its a regression I don't want to deal with. The problem seems to arise with the diffence between the kernels use of ip_chains and ip_tables. And worse still, the project was dead. Still, hope remained - the authors last post noted that although it wasn't ported to the 2.4 kernel, doing so wouldn't be difficult. He wrote:
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Finally, somebody has ported one of the 2.2.x masquerading modules over to the 2.4.x iptables system. Or rather, finally I NOTICED. Anyway, with the new(?) ip_nat_ftp module out there to copy fro^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H inspire me, there's a slight possibility that the dplay module might get ported within the decade.
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A little sarcasm there at the end but still, sounds easy right? Well, now I sure wish I knew a little about all those things and even more about programming. I'm pretty computer savy, and can write shell scripts with little though, (they are simple though), but my programming knowledge is uselessly limited. I am requesting anyone ANYONE with programming expirence to help me - I'd like this ported to the 2.4 kernel. If it would get AOE running multi-player I would be the happiest man alive, or close anyways. The other thing about it was that it apparantly worked behind a NAT which we are behind now and can't actually even connect to zone games or anything - but thats ok we just usually play on our lan. Still that would be really cool if it worked out of linux but not windoze.
Now for the real questions!
- Am I crazy in thinking this is the solution to getting mp working in aoeII?
- Is there actually anyone with the knowledge - knowhow - ability - and freetime to actually do the port.
- Would anyone out of the goodness of their hearts just take this up and do it.
 
Thanks in advance to anyone who would help!!