I just can't get netplay to work

A friend and I spent several hours today trying to get netplay to work, with no success.

We both set up ports and used the portforward.com utility to confirm that 55435 is open on both our machines. In addition, we both added rules to windows firewall to open 55435. We both disabled our third-party antivirus temporarily.

I used the IP address found by googling “what is my ip” as the host IP and set myself to host. We both disabled enable spectator, we both entered my IP in the host IP field. I set myself to server and my friend set himself to client. We both confirmed we were using port 55435. We both set delay frames to 0.

We both downloaded the same Contra.nes rom from the same website and confirmed that the file names were the same. We confirm that we are using the same version number of retroarch and the same nestopia core. Then I load the rom first and he loads the rom after. After a few seconds, the game starts with the “failed to init netplay” message at the bottom of the screen. This happened several times and we gave up.

My friend is running the windows 32 bit version, I’m running the win 64 version.

What am I missing? It would be really awesome to get netplay working. I’d really appreciate any advice or suggestions. Thanks!

I’m not sure if this is your problem, but the host doesn’t put an IP into the blank.

Ok I’ll try that, thanks!

I think windows firewall might be what’s hanging it up- there’s an option under the advanced tab when I add an inbound rule that says “allow edge traversal” - this is set to “block edge traversal” by default.

If anyone wants to help me test this (and maybe play some Contra), feel free to PM me!

Otherwise, I’ll report back with the results whenever my friend and I can try this again.