DirectPlay (DPLAY)

Direct Play is part of the Microsoft DirectX suite and provides networking functionality to games using the Direct Play API. Recently, it has been declared obsoleted by Microsoft, but many older popular games use if for network games. The networking protocol is completely undocumented by Microsoft.

History

Direct Play was launched together with the DirectX suite in 1995. From the network protocol side of it, the only other interesting reliable date is 2002, when the networking protocol received a major overhaul with DirectX 8.2 to make it more suitable for internet play. In 2004, Microsoft deprecated Direct Play and removed the API documentation from their DirectX SDKs, but DirectX 9.x still ship with Direct Play support

Protocol dependencies

• TCP: DPLAY uses TCP For session setup. The ports used vary, but usually range from 2300 - 2400, with the lobby server listening on well-known port 47624.

• UDP: DPLAY uses UDP for transmitting game data.

Example traffic

XXX - Add example decoded traffic for this protocol here (as plain text or Wireshark screenshot).

Wireshark

The DPLAY dissector is partially functional.

Preference Settings

(XXX add links to preference settings affecting how PROTO is dissected).

Example capture file

• SampleCaptures/dplay7_chat.pcap.gz

Display Filter

A complete list of DPLAY display filter fields can be found in the display filter reference

Show only the DPLAY based traffic:

 dplay 

Capture Filter

You cannot directly filter DPLAY protocols while capturing. As the ports used vary, for older versions of DPLAY with every packet sent, you cannot set up a reasonable capture filter.

External links

• http://code.google.com/p/contorted/wiki/PacketTypes is the only place where part of the protocol is documented.

Discussion

Imported from https://wiki.wireshark.org/DPlay on 2020-08-11 23:13:37 UTC