First of all, greetings to all. I'm a newbie on the forum but i'm pretty excited with DosBox.

Cool to see other people are working to get NetBIOS to work on DosBox! I have also been working towards this goal, but by implementing NetBIOS from scratch. I first started by implementing IPX functions 0x0005, 0x0007 and 0x000d so NetBIOS would work, but later scratched the idea of using Novell's netbios when i noticed Armada prevented netbios.exe from receiving IPX packets... My implementation of NetBIOS isn't complete, but it's enough to get Armada playing, which i confess was my primary goal. I was also testing with Syndicate: American Revolt, but it needs NetBIOS sessions and i'm not there yet.

I also have it working by broadcasting packets to everyone, Hal. However, in my code only NetBIOS over IPX packets are broadcasted, the original behaviour is maintained for programs using the IPX interface directly. I am currently checking is this broadcast can be avoided tho...

Anyway, i'm on a windows machine right now, and i lack the tools to make a diff at the moment, but i will be posting one tomorrow if the interest is there.

Best,

Mario Brito
(HCl)

Let's post what you have Mario. The more various patches, the better for DOSBOX...
Maybe you could make a separate thread for your implementation. I or somebody else will then move it into DOSBOX Patches.

Mirek

If I had known somebody is working on this I'd have done something else, or even better, nothing 😀 Well I might have fixed something here and there, especially that Armada prevented packets from being received...

I'm pretty sure sending broadcast packets back to the originator is normal IPX behavior, it just gets misinterpreted due to some bug.

Armada also works with the virtual modem (CVS).

I wonder if there is people who regularly use Dosbox Multiplayer features on the Internet. Multiplayer doesn't seem too popular here at Vogons. Maybe meet in IRC?

well It would be nice if you could figure that loopback stuff out.
A special mode only for warcraft is unlogical 😀
Can't help you figure it out though. Not much freetime.

On the irc channel of dosbox are a few people. but I doubt they play multiplayer.

I'm forcing myself to test out the multiplayer functions in DosBox...it's hard tho.

I've never been a fan of multiplayer, Only LAN based multiplayer gaming, MUDS, BBS's or modem to modem. There's more of a community, and more actual gaming (and less talking...) involved in those activities than the new-fangled MMOG's of today....but since I love DOS games and I used to play them via modem (Falcon 3.0 baby!) it shouldn't be that hard to get my butt in gear.

How stable is DosBox with multiple IPX connections? Is there any way to monitor the amount of data being transferred?

So far I've tested everything with 2 players on LAN, some minutes game play, nothing else. Except for Armada Proving Grounds they all behaved nicely within that time. Data traffic is usually many many small packets, but this may vary by each game. You can use Ethereal to monitor Network traffic.
http://www.ethereal.com/

My experiences in the Wing Commander community indicate that there quite a number of people who use DosBox to play multiplayer games online. I have personally participated on online matches coordinated on IRC... although with atrocious slowdowns due to lag (most of the older games tend to synchronize everything, which makes them very sensitive to lag...)

I tend to test networking functionality with multiple instances of DosBox on the same machine. This is definitely not the best way to do it tho, as i have a slow computer and the extra DosBox instances pretty much kill the system 😐 Can't be helped tho, as i only have one computer at home.

@ Qbix:
The problem is I might not be able to find that bug.

@HCl:
I could think of another way of further reducing lag, need to implement/ test it though...

hal can't you compare a real ipx broadcast packet with the ones dosbox creates ?

They are identical..

Hi, just wanted to share my enthusiasm for the work you guys are doing. As HCl said, there is quite a large community out there playing old games through dosbox and other methods. I myself play SNES emulators with my friends through the net quite regularly.

Anyway, I wanted to let you guys know that I was able to get Magic Carpet running with netbios.exe and the modified dosbox file. I'm pretty excited, as magic carpet is one of my favorite games ever. All I had to do was start the ipx server, establish the connection, run the netbios exe file, then run carpet.exe -network. The rest is configured through the game.

Thanks again for doing such a great job on making the classics playable.

Jose

PS: Accidentally posted this in the devlopment forum, so I deleted it and reposted here.

Nice to get some feedback 😀

Sorry, forgot to answer this a while back:

I could think of another way of further reducing lag, need to implement/ test it though...

I wouldn't bother with it.. Back then we were playing with 4 people online and i believe someone was slowing the entire group down. I just played 1vs1 a few days ago and it was very playable, so in my opinion this shouldn't be a priority.

With two computers it may be ok, but 3+ get double round-trip time (every packet is sent to the server first and from there back to the addressed computer).

I understand that, although i've also played 3-sided games in the past with quite acceptable speeds. In any case, if you want to improve the tunneling code to use a more peer-to-peer approach for packet transmission, go for it, you certainly won't see me complaining 😉

Whether or not high-latency players slow things down for everyone else depends on the networking code of each particular game.

The general idea with realtime games is that one computer is designated as the server, and is responsible for tracking the current state of the game world. Updates on player actions are processed as they come in, and updates on the game world status as a whole are sent out to each other player at regular intervals.

At one point when I was growing up, our family had a 120MHz 486 and a 33MHz 386. My brother and I connected them with a serial cable and played multiplayer games of Doom and Descent on them. We noticed that the slower 386 caused Doom to sometimes run at a slower framerate on both computers, while Descent ran slower only on the 386 (giving the player on that computer a disadvantage but sparing the 486 player from the annoyances of lower framerates).

I believe that as far as latency problems go, Valve solved this in their Half-Life netcode. However, many people mistakenly continued to believe that hi-latency players would degrade the latency of all players - a misconception that annoyed me to no end back when I played Counter-Strike frequently.

Hello,

Someone just linked this thread to me since I was unable to get Hi Octane running in multiplayer mode. I just got the game again and noticed how good it is (there doesn't seem to be any game like that released again). Thanks a lot for this netbios patch.
I'm a bit confused, however. If I use a different dosbox version (cvs) I can start the netbios.exe as well, so why would I need a different dosbox.exe and the dll files you provided? I am just curious to know whether these files are needed because I'd like to use netbios with a different cvs version (the one that has optimized scaling so the game runs faster).
Also: what is that .diff file good for and how is it used?

In case someone doesn't know what to do or can't get Hi Octane working, here's a short how-to:
1) in Dosbox type "ipxnet startserver" (that's for the host, the clients have to type "ipxnet connect IpAdressofHostserver" after the host started the server)
2) run netbios.exe
3) start Hi Octane
4) In options menu there should now be a new option called network options. Go there and check the box for "network"
5) now the confusing part: don't waste your time looking around for something called "network race" in the race menu. Simply select any race you want (single/death match) and after you selected your car the game will automatically establish a connection. Now the other players have 30 seconds to get into the game (they have to connect to the ipx server first in dosbox, of course) and voilá you're set!

Ykhwong's build also has this patch included.
Netbios can be loaded on plain CVS but will refuse to work properly.

Really? That's weird, I got the latest cvs and copied over the optimized scaling cvs and netbios.exe loaded just fine and multiplayer seemed to work, thus my confusion. 😕

Anyways, Ykhwong added Netbios last September and removed it in the same month so your solution is one of the very few that are available and working at the moment.