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kmiller1610

Building an original DOOM LAN

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I've been playing this game on and off for 15 years or so and like to play co-op, so I decided to build 4 machines that would play Doom, Doom 2 and its variants.

Cases: Found a couple of local used gear stores and picked up some XT cases

Parts: Ebay has motherboards with CPU and memory from the Pentium 3 era for under $20, including shipping. The ideal machine is a P3 500, with at least two ISA slots. You can get soundblaster and Geforce 2 MX cards for about $10 each including shipping. I picked up some 3com 3c509b NIC cards for less than $5 including shipping. Other parts were mainly from my stash of castoffs.

The mix: The p3 machines with Dos and WINDOWS 98 can play a variety of machines that won't play under XP anymore. You need to set up dual boot to accommodate both operating systems. Doom, Doom 2, Heretic, Hexen, Duke Nukem, Revolt, European Air War and other great titles from the past can live and thrive on these machines.

Get the 3com cards have Rj45C (Cat 5 ) cables. You can plug em into any switch and they work surprisingly well.

Biggest tech log jam: This is the main reason I registered here and wrote this message. Under CMOS, make sure you turn PNP OS to NO. I spent three days on trying to get a connection until I discovered why a few of my machines would not work....

You'll need the dosdriver.exe file from the 3com site and the right loaders and IPX drivers. I picked up a copy of Personal Netware on Ebay and it had the files I needed.

I have been playing the TNT; evilution WAD (Doom2) cooperatively with some buddies spanning two day long LAN parties and we are only half done.

I have been playing LAN games and hosting parties since 1986 (Midi-Maze) and DOOM 2 C0-Op is just the best....

Kim Miller
58 years young...
Look out. There are two arch villes up on those boxes!!!

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I've been meaning to take my dad's old P2 box for a similar purpose, it's got a great soundblaster in it and I believe a Voodoo 2, and it runs System Shock 2 like a dream.

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That is pretty rad. You probably have one of the few functional IPX LANs still in existence.

I have an old PII400 with an SB16 for classic DOS Doom as well. Nothing beats genuine OPL sound :)

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Never_Again said:

There have been IPX-to-PD converters like this one since '94. Have you tried those?


Back in the 90s, we (my LAN group) bought personal Netware, a 5 license kit that included 5 nics. Over the years, we moved away from the old games. When I began to hunger for Doom, I tried Doom 95 first, but did not like the joystick control, the sound or the inferior sound of the music. Keep in mind that I had been using a Roland wave table card for the music...

So when I decided to get all the way back in, I avoided the new stuff and went back to what I had known.

So to answer your question... no. IPX works just fine... plus I might decide to get back into the original Delta Force (IPX) which doesn't require me to log on to Novaworld, when I want to play a LAN game.

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Kim - How many computers did you link up at your MIDI Maze parties? I was essentially a newborn in '86, but I remember very early on in life linking up gameboys via link cable for one on one Faceball. We may have even had up to 4(!) players with the multitap.

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Shaikoten said:

Kim - How many computers did you link up at your MIDI Maze parties? I was essentially a newborn in '86, but I remember very early on in life linking up gameboys via link cable for one on one Faceball. We may have even had up to 4(!) players with the multitap.


Midi Maze was run on the Atari ST. The maximum possible was 16 machines, but the most we ever got up to was 8. Hard to find that many people who would buy STs and haul them to a party.

Our very first day after Turkey day party, we played linked Microsoft Flight Simulator and Midi Maze because that was all we had.

Is Faceball similar to Midi-Maze?

Kill a Happy Face!

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kmiller1610 said:

Is Faceball similar to Midi-Maze?

Kill a Happy Face!


Faceball 2000 was the same game ported to Gameboy by the original team in 1991. Reading the Midi Maze wikipedia article it looks like a two player SNES version was also released in 1992. The Gameboy version, however, DID support 16 players. That would have to be a pretty funny looking setup though. The only game I ever system linked on Gameboy with any frequency was the original Pokemon, and that was glitchy enough.

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Sorry I couldn't get better pictures, but level 20 of TNT was pretty tough. The first picture is my work station. I used a Gravis gamepad. The case is from an Asus system that had no ISA slots. So I had to replace it. My machine has the Roland Wave Table Card that makes Doom 2's music, so terrific. At this point in the game I am the doorstop. I have the blue key that is so hard to get and am keeping the light on for players who die and need to get past this door.

http://i645.photobucket.com/albums/uu176/kmiller1610/P1010017.jpg

This father and son both play keyboard. The father is playing on a system that was installed in an old server tower. The father was using one of our few keyboards that does NOT have a windows key, which is an advantage for keyboard players. The joysticks were used in the Windows portion of the party. We played European Air War, which no longer works under XP.

http://i645.photobucket.com/albums/uu176/kmiller1610/P1010014.jpg

The son is a chip off the old block, a terrific gamer who is, like most young people, over eager and needs to be reigned in to avoid frags. His machine was also installed in an old server case given to me when another friend's business closed.

http://i645.photobucket.com/albums/uu176/kmiller1610/P1010015.jpg

Our fourth player is a friend who lives close by. The two of us played the first 19 levels of TNT co-op to test the systems.

http://i645.photobucket.com/albums/uu176/kmiller1610/P1010016.jpg

Later in the day, we tried to warp to level 21 using DoomMenu for Doom 2, but for some reason, it kept taking us to level 1. Does anyone know if this is a problem with the TNT wad? I got mine through Final Doom.

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aleksej said:

kmiller1610, nice to see that someone else plays vanilla doom co-op in such authentic way. Join to us! We are doing the same thing but across the internet through tcpsetup/ifrag.
http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-general/45493-vanilla-over-internet-looking-for-opponents-no-dosbox/


I really prefer Lan parties to the Internet. People bring food and chat and you can enjoy each other's company a lot more.

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kmiller1610 said:
Later in the day, we tried to warp to level 21 using DoomMenu for Doom 2, but for some reason, it kept taking us to level 1. Does anyone know if this is a problem with the TNT wad? I got mine through Final Doom.

It should work the same way as DOOM II, as both use the MAP01 to MAP32 markers to mark the levels for the executable. You could test a TNT cooperative game with the command line:

ipxsetup -warp 21 -skill [difficulty] -nodes [computers] 

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Super Jamie said:

That is pretty rad. You probably have one of the few functional IPX LANs still in existence.


You need to read more The Daily WTF ;-)

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kmiller1610 said:

My machine has the Roland Wave Table Card that makes Doom 2's music, so terrific.

These are somewhat hard to find, and reproduce the Doom music to be exactly as the composer intended it. One of our forum members (LogicDeLuxe) is a professional sound engineer and has made high quality recordings of these through his own Roland synth, which he then put up for download. They're my favorite way to listen to the Doom music too.

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myk said:

It should work the same way as DOOM II, as both use the MAP01 to MAP32 markers to mark the levels for the executable. You could test a TNT cooperative game with the command line:

ipxsetup -warp 21 -skill [difficulty] -nodes [computers] 


A buddy and I played the wad cooperatively up through level 18. We had no problem using Doomenu warping back to where we had left off. The day of the party 4 of used Doomenu to warp to level 19.

We played 19 and 20. The later in the day, we tried to warp to 21 and it jumped back to level One.

I watched the screen and all the info was right, but it didn't work. To me, that means a problem with the wad itself

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I just warped to level 21 on my copy, using ipxsetup and nodes 1, and it's fine. Never heard of a warping issue in any of the IWADs.

Maybe your copy got corrupted. You could try reinstalling Final DOOM. You could open it with something like WinTex and check if the level markers are fine.

Perhaps it could be a DoomMenu bug. That would likely be the case if you can warp to 21 by other means.

The TNT: Evilution page on the Doom Wiki has some file specs info (see the bottom.)

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Thanks. That's really helpful. I will test it. I'll also try a command line approach. I had not considered that the problem might be doomenu.

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kmiller1610 said:

The mix: The p3 machines with Dos and WINDOWS 98 can play a variety of machines that won't play under XP anymore. You need to set up dual boot to accommodate both operating systems. Doom, Doom 2, Heretic, Hexen, Duke Nukem, Revolt, European Air War and other great titles from the past can live and thrive on these machines.


There is someone else in the world who has played and loved European Air War! I thought I was the only one! DO you happen to know if there is anyway of getting it running on windows XP (or even Vista) without having to have a dual boot with 98? I have looked and tried everything ot get this glorious game running again but to no avail.
Nice set up by the way, i wish I had the space for another computer, but I suppose 7 in a 3 bedroom house is already ample.

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PhilibusMo said:

There is someone else in the world who has played and loved European Air War! I thought I was the only one! DO you happen to know if there is anyway of getting it running on windows XP (or even Vista) without having to have a dual boot with 98? I have looked and tried everything ot get this glorious game running again but to no avail.
Nice set up by the way, i wish I had the space for another computer, but I suppose 7 in a 3 bedroom house is already ample.


If you install a service pack 1 version of XP and stick with old video drivers, it will work. But that's quite an elaborate "fix."

EAW is really the best, accessible cooperative mode that has such huge ambiance and good play balance. Saturday, we were all 4 of us defending the channel together in our Spits with all that Brit chatter barking through the speakers (I got 7 kills, but had a head on collision that ended my quest for a rating above "Terrible"

Sorry you can't store more computers. I have 6 XP machines, 4 DOS/98 machines and 1 Dos only back-up for Doom parties (plus a laptop).

I built the 4 Dos/98 machines for under $100. (But I did have cases and extra hard drives sitting around)

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PhilibusMo said:

There is someone else in the world who has played and loved European Air War! I thought I was the only one!

My stepdad is a big fan of this game too. There must be a way to get it working under XP, there are references to it on the EAW Wiki and Forum.

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myk said:

I just warped to level 21 on my copy, using ipxsetup and nodes 1, and it's fine. Never heard of a warping issue in any of the IWADs.

Maybe your copy got corrupted. You could try reinstalling Final DOOM. You could open it with something like WinTex and check if the level markers are fine.

Perhaps it could be a DoomMenu bug. That would likely be the case if you can warp to 21 by other means.

The TNT: Evilution page on the Doom Wiki has some file specs info (see the bottom.)


My buddy and I are working on finishing TNT and FINALLY had a session last week. You were right. The problem was Doomenu. By using the command line, we were able to go right to any level. (We are now at 28).

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