I have 2 computers that I want to network with out buying a hub or switch. I've been looking around and found out about a crossover cable, in whitch you dont need any other hardware. I dont have broadband so im not worried about sharing it among the pcs. Will a crossover cable let me play a lan game against another person? and what operating systems or software do they need to have, anything special? or can i just plug it in and it works?

Just connect the crossover cable to each PC.

Now, go onto each PC and set the following settings in TCP/IP settings:

Machine one
----------------
IP ADDRESS - 192.168.0.1
SUBNET MASK - 255.255.255.0

Machine two
----------------
IP ADDRESS - 192.168.0.2
SUBNET MASK - 255.255.255.0

Nothing else is required. No gateway. No DNS. Nothing else.

You also might want to put both of the machines into the same workgroup as well, and to make it easy to access resources, maybe have an admin account with the same name (or, indeed, just the built-in admin account) created on each machine with the same password. That way you will be able to access everything and do everything without worrying about security.

That's about it, really. Peer to peer networking, quick and easy. Someone will probably post with an additional point to make, a small tip here and there, but there is little else to worry about. You should be able to share files and play games just fine.