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Gokuma

Games that will work across these computers

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I have a 120mhz Win95B comp from 95, a 700mhz Win98SE (also Gentoo Linux) custom built in 99, and a 5 year old 1.4ghz WinXP(SP2) laptop networked together (and probably going to get another XP comp in on the action).

So far I've gotten Red Alert 1 with an old beta 3.03 patch and Starcraft to work across all three.

With C&C95 the Win95 comp can't connect to the XP, due to the hacked multiplayer thipx32.dll for XP not working on 95 and you have to use the same file to connect.

Has EA actually fixed multiplayer under XP in the normal re- and free releases of C&C95 and RA1 though?

Since Starcraft works, Warcraft 2 should. One comp couldn't connect to another when I tried years before but maybe I'll have better luck on another attempt. I do have both the regular and BNE edition both with expansion.

With Doom it's a matter of what will work and smoothly. Chocolate Doom throws errors trying to run. Most ports are too demanding. Vanilla Doom still occasionally lags annoyingly in dosBox under XP. An old version of Legacy after it got skins and split screen but before it got all its editing features will hopefully work (was great with just the Win95 and 98 comps). I'd like to play a port with Boom effects or a Hexen source port too though. Only ZDoomdos (which has no music) runs smooth on the Win95 comp, but I don't know about XP (guess I should try that in dosBox). Also dos ports that use Allegro sound libraries are no good on the Win 98 comp. My SB Live just doesn't like it and plays horribly grating loud static sound only with Allegro (so that means practically every dos source port except ZDoomdos).

So anyone have any recommendations? Doncha love this Legacy shiznit?! (<- not referring to Doom Legacy)

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Anything involving old(ish) games + multiplayer + XP usually results in failure for me. Tried Carmageddon 2 and Heroes of Might and Magic 2, couldn't get either game to work over LAN.

Looking at the system requirements, you might not be able to run Carmageddon 2 on the 95 box anyway. Just a few mhz short.

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Gokuma said:

700mhz Win98SE (also Gentoo Linux)

Gentoo? Are you insane?


With Doom it's a matter of what will work and smoothly. Chocolate Doom throws errors trying to run.

Out of interest, which one are you referring to here? Does it not run on Win95, Win98 or both? What are the errors?

I don't have a Win9x install so in all likelihood I won't be able to fix your problem, but I might be able to help.

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You may be interested in this older thread of mine about running Doom source ports on an oldschool machine.

To make a long story short, most modern stuff like ZDoom, prBoom etc. are barely playable at SVGA (640 x 480) resolution, and performance plummets as soon as any PWAD is loaded, even the smallest and simplest one (still haven't sorted through the issues that caused that behavior).

So you may have to go vanilla/DOS Boom/etc. if you intend using PWADs.

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Gokuma said:
SB Live

I'd get get an ISA Sound Blaster 16 or 32 or an AWE on eBay or something and ditch that Live PCI card. If you want the Windows XP computer to connect Doom to the other two, change the operating system to 9x. I'm using a Sound Blaster 32 and Allegro engines are okay (I often use Boom to watch Boom demos). There is a bit of static, but that seems to be "normal" for it (it's a shitty library from what I've experienced).

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myk said:

I'd get get an ISA Sound Blaster 16 or 32 or an AWE on eBay or something and ditch that Live PCI card. If you want the Windows XP computer to connect Doom to the other two, change the operating system to 9x.


Couldn't agree more, that will cut on incompatibilities as much as possible. For the DOS part, a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 or any other card you see explicitly supported in vanilla Doom's sound setup will also do the trick (not sure about DOS source ports though). Avoid "Sound Blaster emulation" or "Sound Blaster compatibility" modes at any cost, though. A real Sound Blaster is always the best choice, when in doubt.

Also, multibooting Win 9x (better if Windows 98 installed over DOS 6.x) will help you with running DOS stuff better, although you may have trouble with the sound if the Win XP machine doesn't have an ISA slot (unless you manage to find a PCI version of the Sound Blaster, or an ESS/Ensoniq)

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fraggle said:

Gentoo? Are you insane?

Why?

Out of interest, which one are you referring to here? Does it not run on Win95, Win98 or both? What are the errors?
I don't have a Win9x install so in all likelihood I won't be able to fix your problem, but I might be able to help. [/B]

It wouldn't run on the Win95 comp I know that. I can't remember exactly how it acted on the other comps.


Anyway, Warcraft 2 is a bust. With BNE The XP comp can't join a game started by another comp and those comps can't join its game. They can only see the game and trying to join just leaves you waiting for response. The old dos/win 95 version can't detect ipx in XP whether run normally or in dosbox. Unless there's some setting up for ipx under dosbox that I'm missing. (EDIT: I needed to enable ipx in dosbox's config, but unfortunately it's only for connecting to other comps running dosbox which I won't be doing on the other comps. You have to connect to each other through ipxnet outside of any game, then connect in the game's ipx).

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http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g70/maniacaljaguar/DooM6players.gif

Sweet! Windows Doom Legacy v1.30 (I have narrowed this down as the best version for this situation) works perfectly. It runs smooth on the old comp and the newer ones can have high res. For the second player per a comp you can use a second mouse (I'm using an adapter to plug it in serial) and/or a gamepad. If you want to have freelook with the keyboard or gamepad remember to turn on mouselook always on for secondary mouse even if one isn't connected. Also, ipx wasn't connecting but tcp worked.

So far, Win Doom Legacy 1.30, Red Alert 1 v.303, and Starcraft work across these three comps. That's a good combination though I never got much into Starcraft.

UPDATE: PrBoom 2.02 works smoothly as well except I have to play with sound effects off on the Win 98 comp or else it crashes with segmentation violation.

Well so far it seems there's no version of Hexen that can work smoothly with the Win 95 comp connecting to the XP comp. I gave SvStrife a try. There's no svstrife_server.exe included so I used the one from PrBoom 2.2.3 that's based on. Trying two players, one or both crash right away. Running one player on the multiplayer server crashes after a while, so that's no good. I guess I have to use ZDoom or Vavoom for Hexen and Strife and that's not going to fly on the old Win 95 comp. I checked out dxHexen and WinHexen 0.20.0 but neither of those have multiplayer.

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Is your 120mhz machine a Pentium or a 486? We don't know these things.

Outlaws
Mechwarrior 2 (vanilla win32 netmech, no 'EXCKSPEE PATCHING' necessary)
Descent II
Descent: Freespace
Jazz Jackrabbit 2
Interstate '76 (disable sound accel on the xp machine though)
Battlezone
Hexen II (prepare for a yawning)
WinBolo
Unreal (3d cards be damned, a 486 can play this roughly 7fps, a P120 would most likely do better)
Necrodome
Zdoom/SkullTag (yes the 120mhz will handle it, remember to change the midi device and turn down the sample rate. For Skulltag, you also should hexedit the EXE to get it to start in 95 because it retardedly 'depends' on a kernel file reading function that is not used.)

DOSBox Megabuild w/ real IPX passthrough (enables your XP machine to natively play IPX games with the 9x machines that use real DOS, requires know-how setup though, DOS ne2000 drivers and winpcap)
It should be noted stock DOSBox's 'ipxnet' is emulation over TCP-IP, this will not work with real IPX protocol with the old computers, so you must use the Megabuild instead

Lots of games from the 90s used the IPX protocol, so make sure you install that on all 3 computers.

Quake'll also work great. Double great if you use engines with compatible network protocols (i.e. a dedicated winquake server that all 3 computers can connect to)
Quake2 will work too, and if your machines have capable 3d cards (not ragepro or pcx2) and some 56mb+ rams, Q3A will do fine, maybe OA even (if you remove the additional player pk3s)

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Age of Empire is a fantastic LAN game (even today), it would run on those systems I assume. AOE2 is another.

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leileilol said:

Unreal (3d cards be damned, a 486 can play this roughly 7fps, a P120 would most likely do better)


Wouldn't count on that, I don't remember it being too playable on my P133. After getting out of the ship and into the open outdoor areas it would slow down to the point where killing the first few enemies in the mines would be a problem.

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Belial said:

Wouldn't count on that, I don't remember it being too playable on my P133. After getting out of the ship and into the open outdoor areas it would slow down to the point where killing the first few enemies in the mines would be a problem.


I agree. I ran Unreal on a P166 with a Voodoo Banshee card and I cut down on a lot of the graphics to get it to run decent, which made the game look horrible. O_o

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Gokuma said:
UPDATE: PrBoom 2.02 works smoothly as well except I have to play with sound effects off on the Win 98 comp or else it crashes with segmentation violation.

That port of Boom should work fine (as it does on my 98 system), except that it messes with the Windows sound volume, which is annoying. Either the sound card or some conflicting setting are to blame there.

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leileilol said:

Is your 120mhz machine a Pentium or a 486? We don't know these things.

Outlaws
Mechwarrior 2 (vanilla win32 netmech, no 'EXCKSPEE PATCHING' necessary)
Descent II
Descent: Freespace
Jazz Jackrabbit 2
Interstate '76 (disable sound accel on the xp machine though)
Battlezone
Hexen II (prepare for a yawning)
WinBolo
Unreal (3d cards be damned, a 486 can play this roughly 7fps, a P120 would most likely do better)
Necrodome
Zdoom/SkullTag (yes the 120mhz will handle it, remember to change the midi device and turn down the sample rate. For Skulltag, you also should hexedit the EXE to get it to start in 95 because it retardedly 'depends' on a kernel file reading function that is not used.)

DOSBox Megabuild w/ real IPX passthrough (enables your XP machine to natively play IPX games with the 9x machines that use real DOS, requires know-how setup though, DOS ne2000 drivers and winpcap)
It should be noted stock DOSBox's 'ipxnet' is emulation over TCP-IP, this will not work with real IPX protocol with the old computers, so you must use the Megabuild instead

Lots of games from the 90s used the IPX protocol, so make sure you install that on all 3 computers.

Quake'll also work great. Double great if you use engines with compatible network protocols (i.e. a dedicated winquake server that all 3 computers can connect to)
Quake2 will work too, and if your machines have capable 3d cards (not ragepro or pcx2) and some 56mb+ rams, Q3A will do fine, maybe OA even (if you remove the additional player pk3s)


The 120mhz is a Pentium with 32mb ram and 1mb video ram. I remember trying stuff like lowering the sample rate in ZDoom and it still didn't run smoothly. Quake 2 is unplayable on it and I'm much rather play Quake 1 than that. I think I might have Descent 1 through 3, though I only played much of one. It was pretty funny. This guy who had experience playing flight sims aside from first person shooters thought he was gonna whoop me. I configured the controls to be like playing Duke Nukem 3D with a jetpack and it was the other way around. Where can I get dosbox megabuild with all those goodies?

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The video card you must be using, no matter what chip it's using, must be a real dog: 1 MB of RAM? C'mon, I had that much on my Cirrus Logic VLB SVGA on my 486 DX/40 FFS...

It pretty much means true colour must only work at 640*480 (for windows games), and anything using 32-bit rendering, even if not directly, pretty much suxx0rz or will not run at all, no matter how low you may set the resolution. Try at least upgrading to a 2 MB S3 or a 4-8 MB Ati Rage pro or something to that effect (the difference is tremendous).

However, there's more to Doom source ports than just RAM and video cards: the PWAD loaders on most ports must be broken, and make everything a ton heavier.

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Maes said:

The video card you must be using, no matter what chip it's using, must be a real dog: 1 MB of RAM? C'mon, I had that much on my Cirrus Logic VLB SVGA on my 486 DX/40 FFS...

It pretty much means true colour must only work at 640*480 (for windows games), and anything using 32-bit rendering, even if not directly, pretty much suxx0rz or will not run at all, no matter how low you may set the resolution. Try at least upgrading to a 2 MB S3 or a 4-8 MB Ati Rage pro or something to that effect (the difference is tremendous).

However, there's more to Doom source ports than just RAM and video cards: the PWAD loaders on most ports must be broken, and make everything a ton heavier.


It is a Cirrus Logic 1mb chip on the motherboard. Blows doesn't it?

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myk said:

That port of Boom should work fine (as it does on my 98 system), except that it messes with the Windows sound volume, which is annoying. Either the sound card or some conflicting setting are to blame there.

There is some weird stuff with the choice of screen resolution affecting the sound. At least on the systems on which I have used it.

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Sound in Boom is also buggy in that is "breaks"; occasionally some of the player's sounds can be heard from the wrong location.

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Joshy said:
Age of Empire is a fantastic LAN game (even today), it would run on those systems I assume. AOE2 is another.

I'll second this. I used to play the two all the time on a 233MHz Pentium running Win95C (both over the Internet and locally), and I remember them running smoothly except occasionally when the population got huge.

sLydE said:
Real men build from source.

Real men don't need Gentoo's build system holding their hand for them; they make Linux From Scratch. And the toughest don't even bother reading the instructions first...

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MikeRS said:
(it's an NT-only thing): http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/6899/win95chocovc1.png

No later versions fixing this bug have been released? I don't think the problem started right after 1.0.0, though, as I'm pretty sure I tried some beta versions after it that didn't yet have the issue. If I get what entryway explained in the Chocolate Doom thread, what needs to be done is make the error nonfatal, at least in Windows 9x.

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Specifically, r1068 broke it.

I doubt Windows 9x compatibility is of any importance anyway.

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MikeRS said:
I doubt Windows 9x compatibility is of any importance anyway.

I think it's important, and it's just retarded to not support it when it's so easy. Especially when people using it are giving feedback about it (aside from helping the project in other ways). Windows 9x is used much more among DOOM players than it is in many other contexts. Even if just for testing purposes (such as comparing it to Doom in its native context), it's useful for Chocolate Doom. And since Chocolate Doom has the potential to work just fine in Windows 9x (unlike new games that might not), it's just a waste not to support it if there's a demand. PrBoom works just fine, so why shouldn't Chocolate Doom?

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I'm wondering if Andrey even has Windows 9x, and he explained in the Chocolate Doom thread what was up and what could be done about the bug.

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The SDL_mixer bug apparently only crashes multi-processor machines, which Windows 9x doesn't support, so the easy cop-out is to just remove the code to set affinity altogether. If true, the stability of Chocolate Doom should not be affected, but this cannot be guaranteed.

unofficial patch here for building, end result screenshot, binaries

Maybe exp could modify his build script to make separate Windows 9x binaries? Either that or fraggle can figure out how to detect functions at runtime, so such a hack isn't required.

EDIT: Also, I've been forgetting to mention, Chocolate Doom will not normally start either. It attempts to use DirectX by default which doesn't work. You can work around this by either running "chocolate-doom -gdi", or by creating chocolate-doom.cfg with the contents of 'video_driver "windib"' (without the single quotes). This also applies to NT 3.x, NT 4.0, Win98, WinMe.

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