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Do I need the exact TA network port information at all?

It depends on the situation. Without firewalls and Network Address Translation (NAT) devices like routers or proxies involved you don't need to care about the network ports used by a TA instance running on a particular computer. For example TA should work in your local home network without any problems as long no stuff mentioned above is involved.
But even in more complex environments with NAT and firewalls the simple approach to open/forward the whole possible dynamic DirectPlay7 port range from 2300-2400 should do the job.

In some situations you may not be able to use the whole port range though, for example

  • if you are trying to get more than one computer from behind a NAT into the same game without using the tool Dxport.
  • if your NAT setup supports no port ranges for forwarding rules nor a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) option so you had to configure a set of 101 respectively 202 (if the NAT distinguishes between the UDP and TCP protocol) forwarding rules.
  • if you want to forward/open as less ports as possible in the NAT configuration instead the whole DirectPlay7 range or using the DMZ option.
If you you need to know the exact network ports TA uses when running on a particular computer for one reason or the other then gettalistenports.exe provides a simple and reliable way to do so.

IMPORTANT

The port scanner can only identify the ports a TA instance binds locally on a particular computer. If the probed TA instance runs in a Universal Plug And Play (UPnP) environment then those local port numbers will not reflect the port numbers under which the LAN TA instance is actually visible to the other TA instances on the Internet because the UPnP entity will expose said instance under a different set of port numbers at its WAN interface. Therefore the results the port probing tool returns in a UPnP environment are pretty useless.

Installing the TA DirectPlay7 port scanner

Download the installer for the TA DirectPlay7 port scanner which is gettalistenports_setup.exe.

Launch gettalistenports_setup.exe by double clicking on it in the Windows Explorer. A Command Prompt window will open in which the installer is executed. The installation process should end with the message shown in the screen shot below (note that the target directory displayed when running the program on your computer may not be 'C:\WINNT' since it depends on your Windows installation):

Hit the ENTER key to exit the installer or just close the the Command Prompt window.

Running TA DirectPlay7 port scanner

  1. Start your TA and bring it into host mode. Make sure you are in the Battle Room as shown below. TA will grab the two DirectPlay7 ports as soon you made it there so it's not required that someone else joins:

  2. ALT-TAB back to the Windows desktop and open the Start->Run menu:

    Type gettalistenports in the field 'Open' and click on the 'OK' button:

    A Command Prompt window should appear on the desktop showing gettalistenports's instruction output:

    Start the actual program execution by hitting the ENTER key.

    After a short processing time the scan result should show up, the information you are looking for is emphasized by the red frame:

    You can terminate gettalistenports by hitting the ENTER key again or just by closing the Command Prompt window.

    IMPORTANT

    The ports TA is using seem to depend on the operating system installed (Windows95, Windows98, WindowsME, Windows2000 or WindowsXP) as well on the installed DirectX version. They may also depend on other DirectPlay7 applications running on the same computer or been running on that computer before you launched TA.
    For instance, you may figure out that TA uses TCP port 2300 and UDP port 2350 on computer A. That doesn't necessarily mean that TA running on computer B will grab the same ports.

Page last updated 2005/08/28 by tcbw@tcbw.net