Router problem or may it be something else ?

[Lenneth]

First of all, this doesn't concern directly me but a person I know I would like to play with. It's simply a question about the problems what it might be:

We both are trying to play SNES games together. We are using both ZSNESW 1.36, have the exact same ROMs, and tried it both with ZBattle.Net and directly with ZSNES' Netplay client.

Now he's behind a router ... and I have no one, but know basic knowledge about port forwarding, NAT an such.
It's not his router and he says, he cannot access it [...].
The weird thing is - SNES9k does work, but we are not satisfied with it. On my side I have huge video problems (AMD XP 2800+, GeForceMX4000, 512 MB RAM) - despite the cheapter video card, _all_ other games I have here run fine, it's only SNES9k which works. I also got the mIRC script Z-Net, but which is only also something like an add-on, similar to ZBattle.Net.

Then every game descynchronizes after a few seconds. I usually beat him twice in Tetris Attack - I have two stars and one victory, he has the same - but on his side. As far as I know SNES9k uses Port 1996 or 1998 (we tried both), we checked the Netplay and Kaillera options, disabled SRAM and such just to avoid that nasty desync problem.

But in ZSNES it doesn't even work:
Whether I host or I'm the client, I see "Found Client." immediately after he also connected. but he keeps seeing "Connecting to client ..."

We tried another ports in ZSNES, but it keeps resetting it to 7845 every time I restart ZSNES.

So, my questions:

1.) Is it a router problem for sure ?
I mean, my computer "sees" him - and a NAT naturally might even block that attempt ?

2.) If SNES9k's port do work - why does it not work when we use the exact same port in ZSNES - we tried it both with UDP and TCP/IP ?

3.) Are there any other emulator capable of Netplay ?
They won't need an uber nice GUI or have to compatible with exotic games, but as long some common games like Tetris Attack and Mario Kart run fine and it provides Netplay, I'd try out every alternative.
On Zophar's Domain there are several SNES emulators, but I simply don't know which are worth and were we might have a chance.

We are both using DSL with 1024kBit/s down. and 128kBit/s upstream.

Thanks in advance for the answers,

Lenneth

[Joe Camacho]

AFAIK, Zsnes *needs* port forwarding if there is a router involved, unless you are in a lan.