Very nice post! I did something related to this a decade back, except it was for Tiberian Sun and to patch its networking code. Jumping into other people's code like this is like having a shared connection in a sense. I noticed to my horror that there was a completely separate stack for modem play; it wasn't like they just sent TCP/IP over the modem or something. Some poor soul must have spent months of their life writing all this custom code for framing and syncing and error handling (what happens if the connection goes down and you have to re-dial, etc.?). Which was irrelevant almost already when the game originally came out.