8 ms·
I was wondering, could DosBox do networking? If so, you could get windows3 with internet installed on anything that could run Linux and DosBox.
by leke 11y ago
I was wondering, could DosBox do networking? If so, you could get windows3 with internet installed on anything that could run Linux and DosBox.
- pjc50 11y agoThere's a patch which adds emulation for the popular NE2000 network card: http://home.arcor.de/h-a-l-9000/ne2kstuff/db_ne2000.html http://home.arcor.de/h-a-l-9000/ne2kstuff/db_ne2000.html DOS itself had no networking support. I don't think Windows 3.1 had native networking either - you had to install Novell for LAN networking or Trumpet Winsock to use a modem.
- trm42 11y agoWindows for Workgroups 3.11 had their Netbios network protocol support + drivers but you needed additional packages for TCP/IP. At that point most of the games used IPX protocol so you needed another DOS network stack like Novell's for gaming. If my memory serves my right, Duke Nukem 3D had Netbios support but all the other games (Doom, Descent, Warcraft 2 etc) used IPX.
- nandhp 11y agoI'm going to leave a link to Microsoft TCP/IP (Wolverine) for WfW 3.11 here for posterity: ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/peropsys/windows/public/tcpip/WFWT32.EXE
- textfiles 11y agoWe have a working networked version of Windows 3.1 that runs in this environment, but let's do one thing at a time.
- pjc50 11y agoCan I just say I really appreciate the archiving you're doing here? I should probably get round to giving you a contribution. Or uploading my shareware collection.
- Sophira 11y agoYou're correct that DOS itself (MS-DOS, at least) has no networking support, but you might be surprised to learn that DOSBox does natively have networking support - in more ways than one. On the DOS side of things, you can configure DOSBox so that one instance acts as an IPX 'server' - a server that other DOSBox clients can connect to in order to form a virtual IPX network over UDP. Programs running under DOS would then be able to use the IPX network - especially useful for games, as back then IPX was typically the only kind of networking available. DOSBox also has support for emulating modems, tunneling the communication over TCP. It does this by allowing the Hayes dial commands to accept IP address/port combinations corresponding to the DOSBox client on the other end (which would have been set up as a server), which many programs would then just accept without validating them. In the event that a program did validate them and not let you enter anything except numbers, you can still do it by padding the numbers with zeroes. For example, if you wanted to connect to 192.168.1.45:1234, you could 'dial' 1921680010451234. Many modem games can then be played this way without having to use any DOS networking support.
- zamalek 11y agoThere was also the port tricks, connect two PCs with a COM or LPT cable and a few games could communicate over them. I recall (but could be wrong) that DOOM 3D could do this. DirectPlay (DirectX networking) also supported this in at least Windows 95. A few VIC 20 games also used this trick.
- Sophira 11y agoYep! That was commonly called a "null modem" cable, and DOSBox supports that style of connection too. :)
- 0x0 11y agoMicrosoft released 16bit TCP/IP drivers for win3.11 as downloadable package, you can use that with Netscape Communicator 4.0 or several versions of IE. Unfortunately almost no web servers support clients that don't send the "Host:" header, so additional proxy servers may be necessary to get anywhere. Also, you can pretty much forget about modern TLS.