so I was looking around on google and found the name "Martin Randall", who supposedly did the online part of Worms World Party for Dreamcast.
And so I emailed the guy after I found his email address somewhere.
I asked him how the servers operated, and what it takes (besides packetlogs) to get this up and running again.
This is Martin Randall's answer:
Hi Petter,
Thanks for your email. I am the Martin Randall that worked on the Dreamcast version of Worms World Party. That was 14 years ago, so you will forgive me if my memory is a little rusty!
The online capabilities were in two phases – setting up an online game and actually playing the game once a host and guests had been established. I mostly worked on the first phase which was part of the user-interface at the start of the game. The WormsNet server was basically a standard IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server – as far as I recall, there were no changes to this at all. The client software in the game’s frontend sent messages using the IRC protocol to set-up rooms, chat to others that were also online and set up games. Rather than send plain text in IRC, the messages were pre-encoded so that the clients could distinguish commands (such as host a game, join a game, start a game, etc.) from general chat. All this logic is encoded in the game software so in theory you don’t need to worry about that if you point them to a standard IRC server. Once a game had been hosted and other players joined (using IRC messages to keep everyone in sync), a final ‘start game’ command was sent from the host and the clients received this. The host/client information was passed onto the game code which then handled the communication between hosts and clients to do a network game.
I don’t recall the syntax of the IRC commands that were sent, but as I said – you should not need to know this as it is all in the code that extended the IRC client software in the game itself.
That’s as much as I recall – it was all a long time ago. Good luck with the project and let me know if you have any success.
Cheers,
Martin Randall