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pcm2a

How to play Doom between Win 3.11 WFW and 95 on real vintage hardware over TCP/IP

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I am trying to set up a gaming scenario using real vintage hardware!

- I have two 486 computers connected to one router with a hard wire, with Windows 3.11 WFW, both also have TCP/IP32 and IPX connectivity.

- I have two 486 computers connected to the same router wirelessly, with Windows 95, both also have TCP/IP32 and IPX connectivity.

What version of Doom would support Windows 3.11 and Windows 95 for TCP/IP play?

If none then is there any 3rd party way to get them playing over TCP?

I've tried:
Kahn - Couldn't get this to work at all
Kali - Couldn't get kalidos to work. Couldn't get a game to play in Kali95.
Couldn't find any Tunneling software for Win 3.11 WFW.

Most of the Doom variations seem like they require Windows 98 or newer. Where is the original love? Getting an IPX to TCP for Win 3.11/95 would be amazing since that would allow me to play any games, not just Doom.

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If your Win 3.11 computers have Winsock v1 installed you could try using DoomWorld (that's a strangely familiar name), which looks like it replaces the DOS Doom/Doom2 executable. There's a download link on this page.

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Yeah, I've been all over that page trying stuff out. My Win 3.11 have Winsock 2 I believe, which comes with TCP/IP 32 and my Win 95 machines definitely do as part of the wifi drivers (Wavelan pcmcia card).

I know I'm fighting a battle here but I'm not ready to give up just yet!

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Maybe set up a null modem connection between the two computers' serial ports, boot them to DOS, and connect them that way?

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If you can find a packet driver for your ethernet card (pretty easy if it's something like NE2000 clone, or 3Com 905, etc.) then you can do TCP/IP stuff directly in DOS. I think I found a version for my card on the old SimtelNet repository, back in 1995. It even had a suite of DOS TCP/IP tools like telnet, ftp, etc. Of course nowadays there's Freedos which also has tools like that. So anyway, you might not even need Windows at all...

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I have packet drivers for all 4 machines. Which doom are you using to do the TCP/IP game from dos?

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Sorry, Windows 3.1 + Win32 + WinG simply aint' gonna cut it.

Doom.exe, as a protected-mode DOS program, would not run very well -if at all- under Windows 3.x, and most -if not all- Doom ports target Windows 95 and above, which made it finally possible to develop something more complex than puzzle or FMV games under Windows (introduced Win32 and DirectX APIs). Even the very first Doom port for Windows was for Windows 95, not 3.1, and even after 3rd-party source ports were available none targeted Windows 3.x, as it was a dead "OS" already, and not the best environment for developing graphics-intensive games.

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pcm2a said:

I have packet drivers for all 4 machines. Which doom are you using to do the TCP/IP game from dos?


I don't have a DOS machine, but there was a program called iFrag that may do the trick:
http://www.gamers.org/dhs/helpdocs/inetdoom.html

Personally, I quickly switched to Linux in 1995 and just ran the linuxsdoom binary, which of course had built-in TCP/IP networking. Played like that many times on LAN, with 2-3 friends. It ran nicely, even on my old 486DX/33.

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Maes said:
Doom.exe, as a protected-mode DOS program, would not run very well -if at all- under Windows 3.x

My two machines with Windows 3.11 WFW both run Doom perfectly through Windows, so that is about 100% incorrect. My 50mhz one also runs Duke Nukem 3d without a single issue. My two Win 3.11 machines can also play doom via IPX without issue (in Windows).

The rest about most of the ports being made for 95 or 98 are definitely correct, since I haven't gotten one to work yet.

hex11 said:
I don't have a DOS machine, but there was a program called iFrag that may do the trick:
http://www.gamers.org/dhs/helpdocs/inetdoom.html


iFrag was one of my first choices but it only works with a "server" that it connects to. The server was never made public, and is not online anymore. I can't believe the Kali servers still run.

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pcm2a said:

My two machines with Windows 3.11 WFW both run Doom perfectly through Windows, so that is about 100% incorrect.


To be fair, my experiences were with Windows 3.1 and on a 486DX/50 machine (Cyrix CPU) with 4 MB RAM (didn't try it when I got 8, as I knew that DOS games generally ran like crap through Windows). Maybe 3.11 was slightly better on that front.

My general experience was that support for most DOS stuff would be flaky at best: very old/simple games with "clean" programming might run with no problems, but the more complex ones using XMS, EMS etc. would not, the very least, because Windows would take up way too much memory, interfere with TSRs etc. and sap CPU power. In general, it would not make games play better, that's for sure. Stuff that "banged on the hardware" too much like e.g. demoscene, assembly trickery etc. would generally result in a GPF, a hang or a failure to start. Trying to use soundcards would be made even more problematic than it already was.

Even if you did manage to run something, it was very system-dependent, unstable, and would always run slower/worse than running it on pure DOS, so there was not much point in trying to run DOS games through Windows. E.g. I could not run Aladdin with the above configuration, but a guy with a 486DX/120 and 12 MB of RAM could....albeit with a ton of problems and veeeeery slowly.

pcm2a said:

My 50mhz one also runs Duke Nukem 3d without a single issue


50 MHz what, 486DX? DN3 was barely playable on pure DOS with that configuration, let alone through the CPU and memory overhead of having to pass through Windows. "Running" a game may mean simply "executing" it in someone's vocabulary, and "being able to fuckin' play it" in another's ;-)

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Maes said:
50 MHz what, 486DX? DN3 was barely playable on pure DOS with that configuration, let alone through the CPU and memory overhead of having to pass through Windows. "Running" a game may mean simply "executing" it in someone's vocabulary, and "being able to fuckin' play it" in another's ;-) [/B]

IBM PS/1 486DX2, 32 megs of ram. Runs and Plays it fine. My other Win 3.11 is a Midwest Micro Elite laptop with 6mb of ram. Doesn't run the Duke3d.

In the 90s I played Duke Nukem 3d on a Packard Bell 25mhz and never had any issues. However, with that I was starting in dos and F8'ing it to not load anything but the sound.

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Maybe you can try DR-DOS. There was a free version released many years ago, in the form of 3 and 5-disk floppy image sets ready to install to HD. I downloaded DR-DOS 7.03 back then, but only have the 3-disk set. Probably they can still be found online though. Anyway I never used it for anything except to play some old DOS games on my p120, but supposedly it's able to run NetWare. In fact, browsing through the User Guide confirms that. I think NetWare has built-in IPX support? I'm not very familiar with that stuff, the only time I ever encountered it was the computer lab at a local community college. But anyway, this might be something you can install on those old machines...

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pcm2a said:

IBM PS/1 486DX2, 32 megs of ram. Runs and Plays it fine.


A 486 DX2/66 might be bearable with a fast video card under pure DOS. The RAM might help with the "virtualization" (essentially, Windows 3.11 having enough RAM to set itself aside while leaving enough for the game), but you're stretching it pretty thin. Then again I don't know what you mean by "fine". Perhaps lowest detail and 8 fps might be "fine" for you, for all I know.

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I remember playing Doom on "Ultimate Doom for Windows 95" which had a launcher with built-in modem play support and all that TCP/IP crap. It even had a dropdown list to select whatever level you wanted to start on and those options to turn monsters off and fast monsters on. I can't remember much of it because it was so long ago and it won't run on any of my machines now since they're all running Windows 7, but I remember playing deathmatch with my dad and his friends over the LAN.

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