Vanilla cooperative with -maxdemo

I'm trying to play Vanilla Doom2.exe 1.9 in cooperative with -maxdemo for longer demo recordings, but the game closes instantly after starting with this parameter. Removing it lets the game run.

We started at -maxdemo 2048 and worked our way down to 512, crashing every time.

Any thoughts?

I'm not sure, and I realize you are far from a novice, but some thoughts:

1) Your command-line is not syntaxed correctly. (Stupid mistakes get everyone occasionally) You could have put "-record -maxdemo 1024" instead of something like this:
ipxsetup -nodes 3 -skill 4 -record ep1 -maxdemo 2048 -warp 1 1

2) Use a frontend like DM.exe(Deathmanager) to 'make/manage' the command-line for you.

3) I assume you are meaning real DOS, not Windows-emulated DOS(or Dosbox, or whatever). It sounds like your virtual memory is not loaded or large enough. Try loading your HIMEM in autoexec.cfg upon boot... or unloading some TSRs if you are using too many. It can also help to run from a freshly booted system in DOS for resource-intensive programs like DOOM because of memory allocation/deallocation issues.
If you are using an emulated DOS, then try increasing the memory associated with the DOS application(eg. create a pif file in Windows).

4) Unfortunately, I recall seeing a similar issue when the IPX driver was loaded in real memory... which makes the IPX tokenization incompatible. But that was with a very old computer.

5) It hurts me to say this, but...
If not in DOS, use a source-port like Chocolate DOOM, prboom, or even Doom95. They will prevent/circumvent the socket/protocol/memory issues.

6) A longshot, but maybe one of the computers is using a different executable.

Thanks for the input.

The syntax is correct, no issues there. All files are identical and we are using Dosbox's IPX tunneling.

We got everything working peachy without -maxdemo.

We decided to move on to chocolate-doom instead as it serves the same end purpose, but we are having an unrelated issue where once we start a game there is no audio.. still looking into that.

Thanks though!

If the commandline is too long, it won't work. You have to fit it in one line.

Thank you Looper, my entire problem is now resolved. I was able to condense the line and still have everything I need in place.