Hmm, messed up my header pic.
SCREENSHOTS | LINKS | FILES
There are a lot of sites dedicated to this 1998 game from a dead company that is no longer supported. think about that for a minute; many new games which are supported by living companies don't have a big fan base or websites devoted to them; what makes this one different, and why should I care?
Well, one reason is because it is a really cool game. and it's relatively firmly entrenched in the abandonware network, meaning it is also free.
Another reason is that once upon a time there were a couple of games that were extremely popular; one was named Elite, and the other was named Privateer. Niether one of those games will play on a modern operating system (without some SERIOUS work, at least). This game will, and is a direct descendant in terms of gameplay to those games.
Captain Zedo's HardWar Community Page
Wez's Hardwar Space combat, trading & multiplayer game site
Now, I mentioned that HARDWAR was free, right? well, it's still a interplay product, which means Interplay could still sue anyone who hosted the files. I stick my neck out on all sorts of other things, so I'll leave this one up to others.
If you want to play on MY dedicated HARDWAR world (did I mention it has dedicated online persistent worlds? no? oops, sorry) I suggest you grab:
The Free Game at Planet hardwar, version F2.1
The Latest stable patch, version U3.00b4
That's all you need to hook up to my server at 66.38.8.41 which will be up for a while, probably at least a month or 2 before I loose interest, take it down, and forget to update this page....
UPDATE: Jan 30th, 2005: Since the last time I set up a bnetd server, I've made some modifications to my Patent Pending firewall software (NACM). These modifications seem to be pretty incompatible with NAT-running clients, causing the system to go into freak-out and counterattack mode. As it's been about a year since I last worked on the code, and have a pretty full plate presently, I don't see fixing the compatibility with Directplay server anytime soon.