Playing Games and Having Fun with Wi-Fi

   

Your avatar has almost reached the inner circle. You've risen through 10 circles, made your way around monsters, and crushed machine gun nests. You are almost home free.

Bam! Bang! Suddenly you are fragged from the side and out of the game.

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In some cases, access to Internet multiplayer games, like Ultima Online, Star Wars: Galaxies, and others, requires a subscription fee for the service.


Welcome to the wonderful world of online multiplayer gaming.

With Wi-Fi, you can be connected and play with and against players at home and across the Internet. None of this takes wires or cabling.

For example, on the Xbox gaming platform, the MN-740 wireless adapter from Microsoft, shown in Figure 7.5, uses either 802.11g or 802.11b flavors of Wi-Fi to connect an Xbox to a network. Because Xbox plays on your televisions, this is particularly convenient: It means that you don't have to wire each Xbox gaming console into your network.

Figure 7.5. Xbox gaming consoles can be connected to Wi-Fi using this gadget from Microsoft.

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You'll find that the MN-740 unit is pretty seamless to install. You won't have to worry about software options or settings: This is all taken care of for you.

tip

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The Xbox console comes with an Ethernet connection, which is what the MN-740 plugs into. So you can use any Ethernet to Wi-Fi connection gadget to Wi-Fi enable your Xbox console. See Chapter 9, "Wi-Fi on Your Desktop," for more information.


At the current point in time, the Sony Playstation and Nintendo GameCube platforms seem to be a bit behind the Xbox in terms of Wi-Fi accessibility. But it is probably true that by the time you read this book, both platforms will offer an easy way to add Wi-Fi capabilities to each gaming device.

The Absolute Minimum

Here are the key points to remember from this chapter:

  • You can do many cool things with Wi-Fi devices.

  • The best is yet to come: Many of the benefits of "unwiring" with Wi-Fi are still in early stages.

  • Wi-Fi makes it easier to have fun with digital photography, games, and much more.


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If your gaming console has a standard Ethernet port, you can add wireless Wi-Fi activity using a wireless bridge device such as the one from Linksys (and other vendors). The wireless bridge can be plugged into the gaming console just as it would be into any computer with an Ethernet port. For more information, see Chapter 9.




Absolute Beginner's Guide to Wi-Fi(r) Wireless Networking
Absolute Beginner's Guide to Wi-Fi(r) Wireless Networking
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 178

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