I've looked how to make this to work few weeks ago.

First, you need lsl.com and ipxodi.com from novell netware, then you also need a novell clien packet driver for your network card alongside a file named "net.cfg".

Next, load in this exact order :
LSL
the card's driver
IPXODI

And if your configuration is good, you should now be able to play together ^^

Getting with IPX will bring you a big advantage over serial : you'll be able to play with 4 players in a game instead of 2 ^^ (obviously you need 4 retro PCs ...)

Deksor wrote:

I've looked how to make this to work few weeks ago. […]
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I've looked how to make this to work few weeks ago.

First, you need lsl.com and ipxodi.com from novell netware, then you also need a novell clien packet driver for your network card alongside a file named "net.cfg".

Next, load in this exact order :
LSL
the card's driver
IPXODI

And if your configuration is good, you should now be able to play together ^^

Cool! Ok, I try this! Thank you very much 😀
Cheers 😄

A lot of the relevant files, as well as some example configurations for an NE2000 card, can be found at Gammy's github page.

zerker wrote:

A lot of the relevant files, as well as some example configurations for an NE2000 card, can be found at Gammy's github page.

Thank you!

Another little question: can use a RJ45 to connect the two computer?

depends which cable you use if your cards can't swap the rx and tx lines by themself. Otherwise, to be safe, just use an ethernet switch ^^

To make it real easy for you (Love a bit of dos networking)
download lsl.com and ipxodi.com from the link zerker gave you

Download the "Novell client for DOS" from here
http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloads … &Downloads=true

copy them into a folder on your PC and load
LSL
PNPODI
IPXODI

You may also want to rem out the MS dos networking as that will take up memory and may clash with the novell networking that games use, or configure a dos boot menu.
I would also just use a switch, even a old router with multiple Ethernet connections will work, dos will ignore all the IP type stuff.

No reason to limit yourself to Doom either, any network dos game will work once you have it up and running

Three comments:
- If the NICs ODI driver gives an error on loading, you may need a newer version of LSL.COM
- for me, loading LSL.COM to high memory makes networking non-functional, ipxodi and the NICs driver can be loaded high.
- make sure in NET.CFG the Ethernet FRAME type is set to the same on all participating computers, the line looks like:
FRAME ETHERNET_802.2

Hi guys,
IT WORKS! Thank you to all, thank you very much, thank you!

For this configuration, I use a Realtek card and one unknown card (which have 2 big squared chip: TI and another one) : the RTL8019 work with realtek drivers, the other one
with generic NE2000 ipx drivers. I want to try various network card because the Realtek work like a charm in WFW 3.11 with TCP/IP, therefore I want to keep for this use. Instead,
for DOS multiplayer, the network card It's just enough to work with NE2000 generic driver, I don't care about another use, and on ebay the Realtek are very expensive.

(sorry for any grammar error 🙁 )

Here a pic of my work in progress 😀

Thank you again guys!

Deksor wrote:

depends which cable you use if your cards can't swap the rx and tx lines by themself. Otherwise, to be safe, just use an ethernet switch ^^

Ethernet switch is the answer 😀

For a real vintage LAN, I have to connect the 2's pc with a coaxial cable, but... 😁

elianda wrote:

Three comments: - If the NICs ODI driver gives an error on loading, you may need a newer version of LSL.COM - for me, loading LS […]
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Three comments:
- If the NICs ODI driver gives an error on loading, you may need a newer version of LSL.COM
- for me, loading LSL.COM to high memory makes networking non-functional, ipxodi and the NICs driver can be loaded high.
- make sure in NET.CFG the Ethernet FRAME type is set to the same on all participating computers, the line looks like:
FRAME ETHERNET_802.2

Thank you, I write this on my text file!
I have load the 3 file on conventional memory and I have enough RAM for playing games.

Just for fun, if I want to share a disk on IPX network? It is possible?

Cheers

Microsoft File Sharing used to be able to work over an IPX transport, and there are ways to support the Netware protocols too (NCP?). I'm not sure why you'd want to, but it is theoretically possible. (If you want to talk to modern stuff, it really helps to speak IP as well.)

I think with WinXP you can still share through IPX, you just have to install the protocol manually as it is not installed by default.
For DOS the imho easiest way is to use Personnel Netware which is basically a TSR that can be loaded from normal DOS. If it is just about the client i.e. mounting the share as drive in DOS, it is also considerably smaller than using TCP/IP.
It can be loaded high and also QEMM has special support for it, such that it doesn't use any memory at all. (Its moved completely to XMS)

It's a shame that nobody did make a lightweight TSR for file sharing over TCP/IP for DOS, all you can use basically is microsoft's network client and this takes loads of RAM

It's a little klugy, but you could also use any of FTP or HTTP (with wget or curl). There's an NFS client out there too, IIRC - there was a thread about it a while ago. IIRC, that thread also came up with another alternative though I'll be darned if I can remember what it is.

There's also SFTP using SSH2DOS, but that doesn't play terribly well with modern SSH implementations, especially those using AES-GCM ciphers. I can connect to a box running Sun SSH on Solaris 10, but not to a machine running Gentoo Linux, due to slight protocol differences.

Deksor wrote:

It's a shame that nobody did make a lightweight TSR for file sharing over TCP/IP for DOS, all you can use basically is microsoft's network client and this takes loads of RAM

I'm speaking under correction, but I believe it is also possible to use Windows for Workgroups without the GUI.
At this stage it is not of much use, of course, but at least the network stack would be up and working already.

I don't know how much less or how much more conventional memory this takes up, though.
Also, I believe I got this piece of information from reading an old book about networks.
It explained different topologies such as star, bus and token ring.

Deksor wrote:

It's a shame that nobody did make a lightweight TSR for file sharing over TCP/IP for DOS, all you can use basically is microsoft's network client and this takes loads of RAM

Erm, Personnel Netware is not Microsoft its/was Novell.

But you are right in one aspect, that using the Microsoft Client in DOS is usually not the best solution.

Yes, I know, I was just saying that since there are TCP/IP stacks for DOS, one could imagine that a file sharing TSR compatible with microsoft's share over TCP/IP would exist but nope.

Nowadays it could be cool if somebody made this to connect to modern microsoft shares so we wouldn't need to modify windows' way of managing shares though this might ask way too much work to do this. Connecting to "just" a samba share would be cool too

Deksor wrote:

Nowadays it could be cool if somebody made this to connect to modern microsoft shares so we wouldn't need to modify windows' way of managing shares [..]

How about using a Raspberry Pi then ? 😀
A while ago we had a few discussions about using a Pi to access network shares.
It was mainly about the set of difficulties involved to create a share
that can be accessed by both old and new Windows releases.

Maybe this can also be applied to IPX ?

Back in the 90s people used to run Win95 machines to integrate good ol'
RS232-based 25$NET (aka Kirschbaum-Link ?) network shares into TCP/IP or IPX networks.
What they essentially did was to load the old DOS network software before Windows
started and then made these "drives" available to the modern networks.

I know for sure that at least older Linux kernals had some sort of IPX support.
No idea, though, if this ability is still a part of Raspbian.

windows 3.11 share drive problems
Windows 98se FTP
Modern printer with pure DOS

I AM using a rpi at the moment, but I'm using a samba share over TCP/IP ^^

having a new tsr for what I explained earlier would still make life much easier though

Btw, I never managed to load LSL, the network card's driver as well as ipxodi in high memory. When I type LH lsl or whatever, it stays in conventionnal memory