On Christmas day I hauled my PC with us over to my Girlfriends sisters house. My "brother-in-law" and I both play a game called Aces High. It's a flight combat simulator using World War II vitage planes. It's PC only game and one of the few things I use my PC for.

Usally he brings his rig over to my house, since I have the broadband. He hooks his PC into my router and it's up and running. He has dial-up so the plan was for me to hook my PC to his PC via ethernet and he would enable internet sharing. With my Mac way of thinking I figured I could use a regular ethernet cable to connect the two. That's because Mac released in the last few years have auto sensing ethernet jacks. That means that the ethernet port knows what the wire configuration needs to be depending on how you have them hooked up. Otherwise for this sort of computer to computer connection you need a cross over cable that has some wire swapped.

Neither of the ethernet ports on our PCs had auto sensing ports. And we didn't have a cross over cable. Hmmm... What to do. I had an idea! I hooked my Powerbook up to his computer via ethernet. Internet sharing worked with my Mac since I had the auto sensing ethernet jacks. I also have firewire ports on my PC and Mac. So I connected the Mac to the PC via a firewire cable. Enabled internet connection sharing on the mac via the firewire port and enable the firewire network port on Windows. I turned off the firewire on the the Mac and viola! The PC had a network connection via the Mac which had one via his PC.

Believe it or not Aces High was very playable with both of us on his dial-up. I think it's because A: He has a very clean line and gets a pretty fast connection for dial-up and B: Aces High has low bandwidth requirements.