In case it helps someone, here are all my findings from doing a two pc racing cabinet setup..
Router and IP’s - The TPLink router method has worked great so far. I used 192.168.0.2 for pc1 and 192.168.0.3 for pc2. The router (gateway) is 192.168.0.1. This was not spelled out at all but literally all you do is hook up a network cable from pc1 to the yellow/orange router port and hook up pc 2 to another yellow/orange router port. Nothing needs to go in the blue port since you are only communicating over the router. I did go into my router settings via web browser (
http://192.168.0.1 or something like that, whatever the instruction book says) and turn off wireless and all the extra stuff but not sure that is needed or not. I am not sure how Teknoparrot games would work without a router since most of them require a gateway.
More IP Address info:Almost all games work with this ip setup. The only one so far that does not is Daytona USA Championship 3. For that I added a bat file to “add” a 2nd IP address before the game runs (Launchbox has pre and post launch settings on the properties option of the game) and then delete after exiting. I used 192.168.1.3 for pc 1’s added ip and 192.168.1.4 for pc2’s added ip but it just has to be between 192.168.1.1 and 1.8. “Netsh interface ip add address “Ethernet” 192.168.1.3 255.255.255.0” for example. Then just put that in a bat file, create a shortcut to that file, then change the properties of the shortcut to be minimized and also the advance box to run as an administrator since netsh requires admin privs. Then run the shortcut before kicking off Daytona 3. Same thing but delete for remove. It doesn’t matter that the router is actually still 192.168.0.1 or that your main ip is still 192.168.0.2/3. For all the games I am adding at least this seems to work great.
Daytona USA 3 one and 2 player option?For Daytona USA 3, if you want both single and multiplayer option, I created a 2nd copy of the Sega folder called Sega_singleplayer and also a copy of the Teknoparrot files pointed to the single player Sega folder. Then you update all of the files for network for the regular Sega folder (another ArcadeControlForum post about a post being removed spells most of this out) and also make sure to enable the camera in the ini file. Otherwise you will get [Good], [Good] before one good goes away. There is a YouTube video where someone says to update the Teknoparrot.ini file but allows no comments on the video. That is incorrect. The file he is showing is for Outrun2 and setting any network related settings in the Sega Daytona folder for Teknoparrot.ini erases all those network related settings after each start and is not used. There are 192.168.1 plus base addr of 3 (or 4 for pc2 in my case) settings plus num of computers and slave/master ini changes that need set through config files though.
Outrun 2 one and 2 player optionFor Outrun2, there are config files that are shared in users folder I think it is so creating two copies of outrun2 and Teknoparrot won’t work if you want to have a one player AND LAN 2 player option. If you want both, there is a YouTube video where someone has ahk scripts to copy the needed files (which internally changes service menu lan settings) so you can have both options.
Two PCs?Two PCs are best. The only exception is Mame Rush the Rock (and sort of Mame Rush 2049 possibly?) is the only game that for now only (with major workarounds) works lan on one pc. Hopefully a mame developer fixes that as it is oh so close to working across PCs and only crashes about 50% of the way through. As far as I can tell it fully works on one pc without crashing. I am not sure if one pc could use usb switches for two (g29, etc) wheels etc to one pc (and also two PCs) but that is a pain. You would also need a third party tool to allows two wheels (g29, etc) dinput inputs at once for example. California Speed seems to work great over two PCs with the caveat below.
Tap adapter Games Scripting network The bad news with the Mame Rush the Rock/Rush2049/California Speed is that the Tap adapter does not appear to work with the regular networking and breaks the other LAN games. It prevents ping from each pc to another. I thought no sweat at all… I will just script the tap adapter network bridge add and removal.. However, apparently Windows 10 has no way to do this according to Microsoft as of 2020+. I used gpt3 to write a bunch of ways to do this over an hour+ and none worked. If anyone knows a third party tool to do it please let us know.
Mario Kart GP DX ips I found that keeping both ip addresses at once stopped Mario Kart network ip recognition on pc2 so that is why I add and remove ips just for Daytona 3. Technically you could “change” ips but this way if anything ever happens 95% of the games still work and you just go back to Daytona 3 and start and exit to fix (but no issues so far).
Hopefully this helps since there is surprisingly very little (no?) walkthroughs on a lot of this.