360 System Link - help please!

Here's the scoop: I have 3 buddies coming over tongiht, one of whom will bring his 360. I've never tried System Link before, so I want to make sure that I've got all my ducks lined up.

We'll have:
2 360's
2 TV's
1 cat-5 Ethernet cable
1 Ethernet crossover connector (something like this)

Am I right in thinking that it's as simple as hooking the two consoles up with the cat-5 cable attached to the crossover connector?

I know Left 4 Dead will support both xboxes running in split-screen mode. Any idea if Borderlands and ODST will?

If you are hooking the two 360s via a LAN then they can each have a Cat 5 ethernet to the router.

If you are going to hook them directly to each other, if its like the original xbox, then you would need a single patch (cross-over) cablebetween them.

You'll need to make sure both 360s have gotten the same updates for the games. You'll probably need to have your live enabled profile on a memory card and at least temporarily have each 360 hooked up to the internet. Log into LIVE via each console ahead of time to boot up the game so they can update automatically.

Irongut wrote:

If you are hooking the two 360s via a LAN then they can each have a Cat 5 ethernet to the router.

If you are going to hook them directly to each other, if its like the original xbox, then you would need a single patch (cross-over) cablebetween them.

You'll probably need to make sure both 360s have gotten the same updates for the games. This might involve you logging in ahead of time to boot up the game so they can update automatically.

I think that's the info I needed. I was hoping to keep the router out of the equation as that felt like needlessly complicating it. So I should be good with the crossover adapter.

Thanks!

ODST will, I haven't tried Borderlands. I'm not sure if you need the crossover connector. I thought that we just used a plain cat5 when last I did this. My memory is hazy, though. It was just as easy as connecting the two consoles and then selecting the right option when joining the game, though.

EDIT: I'm wrong about the cable, per the comments below.

The only thing I'm not sure about is whether you can do 4 player coop via two player splitscreen on two consoles. You might check the web on that a bit.

You'll have to let us know how it works out. (and I hope it works) It sounds like it would be a blast.

Irongut wrote:

The only thing I'm not sure about is whether you can do 4 player coop via two player splitscreen on two consoles. You might check the web on that a bit.

You'll have to let us know how it works out. (and I hope it works) It sounds like it would be a blast.

This thread I found in some dingy backward corner of the internet suggests that L4D supports it.

You might not even need a crossover cable. More recent (and more expensive) Ethernet chipsets support auto-crossover, which I think is called MDI-X. You just plug in whatever cable you want, and the chips figure it out.

If the 360 doesn't have that, which it may not, then a single crossover cable between the two should work. Alternately, you can use the router, and run one regular cable to each one. Just make sure to plug into LAN ports, not the single WAN port. That port is usually physically separated from the others. Don't use that one.

For instance, on the WRT54G series, the ports look kind of like this:

XXXX X

Use any two of the ports that are close together, avoid the separated one.

Malor wrote:

You might not even need a crossover cable. More recent (and more expensive) Ethernet chipsets support auto-crossover, which I think is called MDI-X. You just plug in whatever cable you want, and the chips figure it out.

If the 360 doesn't have that, which it may not, then a single crossover cable between the two should work. Alternately, you can use the router, and run one regular cable to each one. Just make sure to plug into LAN ports, not the single WAN port. That port is usually physically separated from the others. Don't use that one.

For instance, on the WRT54G series, the ports look kind of like this:

XXXX X

Use any two of the ports that are close together, avoid the separated one.

Edit: I thought you didn't need a cross over cable but after searching it appears you may need one.

As an update to this - I can confirm that the crossover cable worked.

I didn't try it with a straight-up Ethernet cable, so it's possible that that woudl work just fine too.