Not sure why its suddenly working…. but I suspect it may be either updates to both OS/2 base OS & TCP/IP or…. it is because I’m using the QuakeWorld server code that matches the client…. Anyways I’ll upload a binary and the rest later as it is super late. Â But for those of you who want to see it…
Yes it really is an OS/2 exe built with EMX!
I’ve updated the sourceforge page to include an exe, and a copy of the updates that I’m using to OS/2.. Oddly enough my OS/2 install with Virtual PC no longer works… The NIC isn’t found anymore, must be some update? Â I’ve got 6.0.192.0, although I know for a fact that this image used to work…
Broken driver
Further update, turns out I’m retarded the AMD PCNet driver is for VMWare/Qemu … Virtual PC emulates a DEC 21140a, which I downloaded a NDIS2 driver from Intel which works great. Â I do have to turn off hardware assisted virtualization otherwise OS/2 won’t boot at all from the hard disk.. Â I’m not sure if it is because I’m now on an AMD computer, or if it is the matched QuakeWorld server/client but it works fine… in Qemu & Virtual PC.
XR06055 or XR06100 is required for a lot of 32-bit OS/2 software – quite fundamental changes…
I was going to tell you that Virtual PC emulates a DEC NIC, while VMware/VirtualBox do an AMD PCnet. But you clearly figured it out 🙂
Yeah what a slip… What I don’t get is why was it in my Virtual PC disk folder from over two years ago…???? It obviously wont work, but I know I tested this thing on VPC. And when I did all I could do was about 20 seconds of useful commands then it’d repeat the last to no avail. Now it works flawlessly for no apparent reason…. I should do some mouse programming for it, and post it @ os2world.com … lol
But it runs full screen, 320×200 only as I need physical buffer access, esp since that is about as good as it gets in 2.0
I thought there was a way to use higher resolutions (VESA – you don’t really want the funky VGA resolutions like 512×384) even in OS/2, but I don’t recall the details. It may well be that a newer OS/2 version was needed for that.
FYI, the DOS version of Quake runs like a greased lightning in VirtualBox when hardware virtualization is used with a VESA graphics mode. You can actually play the game at 1024×768 at a pretty high frame rate, which was impossible back in the day because the CPUs just didn’t have enough horsepower to push that many pixels.
What is annoying is the lack of “good” TCP/IP support in MS-DOS. Naturally OS/2 does support it, but it is an addon to the TCP/IP stack… And I was lucky to even get a copy of that (which I’ve managed to lose but I at least was smart enough to make disk images of).. Not that it’d matter as I’d need the SDK which I’m sure was yet another addon to program the thing. I have no idea why IBM made it so blastedly difficult to write stuff for their products but the natural result was that nobody did…. And if it was 1994 people would just be bemoaning that it is a DOS exe, there should be an OS/2 exe for running games.. lol….
I don’t think VESA SVGA modes came into play until OS/2 2.11 or 3.0? You had to run some MS-DOS tool which no doubt did some magic much like the DOS int 13 disk driver. Fun with V86 mode indeed!