Introduction

This is a guide showing how one can play Theme Hospital (to avoid confusion not CorsixTH) over the internet on almost any OS. The information is from an excellent blog at http://blog.webicity.info/2009/10/13/theme-hospital-on-modern-computers/.

Required software

An installation of Theme Hospital is of course required. There are a number of versions out there. The patched, dos compatible one is needed. If you have one file called WinMain.exe and one called Hospital.exe in your installation directory you should be fine. You will also need DOSBox, which can be obtained here.

Setup

After installing DOSBox you will first need to edit its config file. In Windows an option has been added in your start menu called DOSBox <version> Options that opens it. Near the bottom of the file opened, there is a line which says ipx=false. Change that to ipx=true.

Now go to the very bottom of the file and add a new row:

mount C "<path-to-game> where <path-to-game> could be for example C:\Hospital depending on where you installed the game.

To start playing one of the players will need to be the server while the others connect to him/her. You can also check below at "Connect to an already running server" if both want to be clients.

Acting as the server

Start DOSBox and enter the following command.

ipxnet startserver <port>

You can omit <port>, it will then default to 213. If that doesn't work you can choose something like 2000 or whatever. Make sure that this port is forwarded to your computer if you're behind a router or equivalent. Check out this site and find your router in the list if you don't know how to do that.

Acting as a client

Ask the server player what IP he/she has. (Use www.whatismyip.com to find out). Then enter the following:

ipxnet connect <ip-address> <port>

Note that these commands can of course be written at the bottom of the configuration file for DOSBox if you don't want to type them every time. Given that the server player always has the same IP and uses the same port.

Start the game

Now it should just be a matter of typing C: to get to your previously mounted game location and start the game with hospital.exe.

If you want to find other players to play with, check out the IRC channel.

Connect to an already running server

If you don't want the hassle of forwarding ports you can, if you're lucky and it's up, connect to an already running server. This is the command:

ipxnet connect www.shuttlex.se 2000