I found this link where someone had implemented a virtual NE2000 for DosBOX, allowing you to run among other things DOOM!
This reminded me of my own work to add pcap into Qemu back in the 0.9.0 days… SO I figured I’d try to build the thing out and see how they interact!
So the first thing to do was build DosBOX, and add the patch. I found that 0.73 worked pretty well for this!
So after some hammering around, I got it to build, and launched it on two separate machines (one over terminal server) on my lan, and launched the oldest network doom version I could find to get things going.
Doom multiplayer IPX-SPX
And there we go. Now in the dosbox.conf you have to make sure that they have unique MAC addresses, and of course, that they are bound to the correct physical nic. in the config file, there is a list option that will print out the possible choices then you can just put the number, or the full name into the right spot on the ini file. I’ve build a prebuilt win32 version of this with all the DLL’s and the gravis ultrasound enabled… You can download it here.
The next thing I did was search high & lo for my patches to Qemu, and thankfully I’d emailed them to myself as it seems all the other places are dead… So with a little playing with Qemu 0.90 to enable the adlib, and remove some logging messages, I’d built a client machine again with Doom. Naturally I had the DosBOX & Qemu face each-other off.. Sadly this is a little SLOW.
DOSBox and qemu IPXSPX Doom
For those that wish to download, you can find the Qemu client & server files.
Now for Qemu, you’ll need to get that full NIC name… Dosbox provides a great way to see what it is, just paste it into the batch files, and you’ll be good to go.
And remember you’ll need WinPcap installed!!!!!!
Heh, I got Windows 3.1 TCP/IP working with that build of DOSBox – you just need the DOS ne2000 packet driver, winpkt and one of the many WinSocks (not Microsoft's TCP/IP driver though – that one requires MS-DOS networking, and as such only works if you use a disk image, which takes most of the fun out of DOSBox).
I also ran Arachne browser successfully.
Wow IPX/SPX working in Dosbox? That’s nice. I would be curious if this would potentially work over the internet as well, for two remote computers.
There’s this old DOS game from 1996 called M.A.X. (Interplay) I tried to play with other people over the years, trying both Hamachi and Tunggle to connect computers remotely.
We even got IPX to connect once, but for whatever reason the game was running super slow. When the connection dropped after a few minutes (it would never last long) then the game ran at normal speed once again.
Do you have any clues for why that would happen?
Any other recommendation for IPX over Internet besides Hamachi-type things?