IPX support for DOSBox

[Alon Amir]

Hello,
Is there an option to use IPX?
I ask because I wish to add support for Q2Dos with DOSBox on a multiplayer launcher I'm working on, called NukemNet.

[Frank Sapone]

We removed it some time ago. But I believe DOSBox X has support for NE2000 emulation which means you should be able to get TCP/IP.

[Frank Sapone]

I must also state, it’s rather foolish (imo) to use Q2DOS under DOSBox. It’s only really been tested on real hardware. We won’t fix difficult bugs that are unique to DOSBox. If you must use our port, with our features, we have Windows builds available.

[Jason Stevens]

it should interop with the win32 native stuff, you’d be better off just running something native, not wrapped in dosbox. Performance and stability aside… I wouldn’t want to run a DOS server, I’ve always done my testing with either OS X or Win32 servers.

[Alon Amir]

Im well aware that running native exec is better performance-wise, that's why I already added support for native quake2 in next release.

But this is not about petformance, I wanted to add q2dos support (in addition to native support) just for the fun of it, being a retro games multiplayer launcher, some will appreciate it.

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[Frank Sapone]

I am sorry to say, and I mean this to not sound rude, but we won't be adding ipx back in and we will not support dosbox in any official capacity. Theres too many custom compiles out there with who knows what to dosbox and its not accurate. The performance on dosbox with q2dos is pretty bad. Bad enough that I suspect very few people would bother to actually play it beyond a curiosity.

[Alon Amir]

That’s fine :} not every request has to be granted, I guess I’ll look into ne2000 ethernet emulation, also supported in DOSBox Staging if I recall correctly.

btw, I get pretty descent and smooth experience running Q2DOS on DOSBox Staging, I understand it’s not your focus, but even so, looks like you’ve done a well enough job that it runs fine there too.

Thanks for your project.

[Frank Sapone]

Yes, I’d imagine newer machines it may run acceptable at 320x240 but SVGA is probably pushing the limits. 3DFX emulation is more or less a slideshow.

I believe DOSBox supports NE2000 out of the box, if not the “DOSBox X” port definitely does.