ruthan wrote:

I never played through network card at Dos, had these games whole IPX stack everytime inbuild or you have to have already something (network driver, Netware) installed?

Well, you would load your specific NIC's ODI driver, and the IPX stack driver (2-3 TSRs total), which is the basis of the Novell NetWare stack (basically everything required for NetWare except for the actual NetWare login/drive mapping client itself). At that point, you could launch your IPX-using game (Doom, Rise of the Triad, Warcraft, etc.) and have LAN party fun.

Short answer, no, the games don't have the full stack built in (unlike mTCP), and require the IPX stack... which uses about 10-20% of the memory required for Microsoft's stack.

RJDog wrote:

At that point, you could launch your IPX-using game (Doom, Rise of the Triad, Warcraft, etc.) and have LAN party fun.

Was lanparty behind paywall or it was free? Would you need also some Netware server is network or its working at peer to peer basis?

ruthan wrote:

Was lanparty behind paywall or it was free? Would you need also some Netware server is network or its working at peer to peer basis?

Lol, sorry... a "LAN party" was an ad-hoc (occassionally professionally organized) event, not a piece of software or pay-for thing. People in the mid to late '90s and early 2000s would pick up their bohemoth PCs and CRT monitors and bring them to a friends house... get 4 or 5 friends together like this in one place and spend all night and/or all weekend just eating junk food and playing comouter games head-to-head against each other on your respective computers connected together, probably using some shitty 10-BaseT hub your dad brought home from work.

And it was peer-to-peer, games using their own (broadcast) discovery protocols to figure out who was also running the game on the local LAN segment and waiting to play against (or with) someone. It wasn't until things like Battle.net came along (Warcraft II?) that network game play became an organized pay-for thing. Things like GameSpy also came along and helped organize things between players not on a local LAN segment, but LAN parties still were a thing because they're fun.

Netware required a server, most home LAN games used Netware Lite or Personal Netware which didn't require a server.

RJDog wrote:

Lol, sorry... a "LAN party" was an ad-hoc (occassionally professionally organized) event, not a piece of software or pay-for thing. People in the mid to late '90s and early 2000s would pick up their bohemoth PCs and CRT monitors and bring them to a friends house...

I know, i know, but we used everytime Win9x+ inbuild networking or Serial port cables for DOS, Netware was something fancy what we saw only in some institutions..

ruthan wrote:

we used everytime Win9x+ inbuild networking or Serial port cables for DOS, Netware was something fancy what we saw only in some institutions..

Ah, yeah, well before Windows 95 and the proliferation of TCP/IP, users in pure DOS running DOS games needed something else... as mentioned above, Novell's Netware stack can be run without a server, and that's exactly what games took advantage of.

Back on topic, however, I discovered that although I'm not 100% sure that I have any NICs that are old enough to be supported by Netware 4.11 (oldest I have is an Intel Pro/100+, and can't find for 100% certainty that either drivers for it online, or that it is supported out of the box... 4.11 came out in 1996, the card came out in 1996...) I did discover that the VIA EPIA computer that I have spare lying around and was thinking of using for this project actually does have drivers for 4.11 for its on-board NIC. I am usually not a fan of using on-board NICs in pretty much any case, but I gotta give props to VIA for making drivers available for pretty much every EPIA board it seems for Netware 3, 4, 5, and 6... I'm impressed actually.

RJDog wrote:

and can't find for 100% certainty that either drivers for it online

Wow, I have no idea why this took me so long to find, but this will obviously be helpful to other folks looking to install Netware:

https://developer.novell.com/devres/lan/drivers/

It's not explicitly stated on the page, but it appears the drivers linked here should work with NetWare 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x....

Ok lets see that you will get Netware 4/5 licence.

What is OS compatibility, could Netware networking work in modern MS OSes like XP, Vista, Win7, Win10? To make ultimate DOS to WIn7/10 file sharing solution?

Because FPT server client could do that, yeah with limitation, but its probably still better than in Win7/10 start some Win98 / WinNT4 / Win2000 virtual to copy files through it to DOS share and vice versa..

RJDog wrote:

ruthan wrote:

I never played through network card at Dos, had these games whole IPX stack everytime inbuild or you have to have already something (network driver, Netware) installed?

Well, you would load your specific NIC's ODI driver, and the IPX stack driver (2-3 TSRs total), which is the basis of the Novell NetWare stack (basically everything required for NetWare except for the actual NetWare login/drive mapping client itself). At that point, you could launch your IPX-using game (Doom, Rise of the Triad, Warcraft, etc.) and have LAN party fun.

Short answer, no, the games don't have the full stack built in (unlike mTCP), and require the IPX stack... which uses about 10-20% of the memory required for Microsoft's stack.

You don't need Netware to play IPX games. I remeber playing Command and Conquer and Red Alert on IPX, back in school.

ruthan wrote:

What is OS compatibility, could Netware networking work in modern MS OSes like XP, Vista, Win7, Win10?

Yup 😀 https://www.novell.com/support/kb/doc.php?id=7016731

Thats said, I don't consider Windows 7 or newer to be particularly "retro"... my goal is to have a single solution for DOS-WinXP (the range of my retro machines) and NetWare not only fits this bill but is itself retro and has nostalgia cred with me, so, bonus.

I have decided to go with NetWare 5 for a couple of reasons... it is easier to manage (in some respects) than NetWare 4, suppprts the hardware I want to use out of box, and NetWare released a free 3-user license version of it in 1998 for "trial" purposes, which is more than enough users for what I need. Additionally, in my setup, the NetWare DOS client which supports NetWare 5 uses a whole 4k of RAM 😀

Roman78 wrote:

You don't need Netware to play IPX games. I remeber playing Command and Conquer and Red Alert on IPX, back in school.

No, you don't need the full NetWare client; but you do need an ODI driver for your NIC and the IPX protocol stack, which is the basis of the NetWare client stack (and all courtesy of Novell).

RJDog wrote:

Thats said, I don't consider Windows 7 or newer to be particularly "retro"...

- Im now using Windows 7 and Windows 10 machine mainly now, that i dont care if it is retro or not, i just want to have filesharing solution across all my machines (not 2 solutions for retro and non retro) and my main NAS is running on Windows 7 64 bit too, i tried few NAS OSes and some hardware NAS solution, but i find out hat full blown Windows OS nas is best for me, it could be used as emergency browsing machine and during LAN parties as too, it can run some Virtual building machines, so it win-win.

RJDog wrote:

I have decided to go with NetWare 5 for a couple of reasons... it is easier to manage (in some respects) than NetWare 4, suppprts the hardware I want to use out of box, and NetWare released a free 3-user license version of it in 1998 for "trial" purposes, which is more than enough users for what I need. Additionally, in my setup, the NetWare DOS client which supports NetWare 5 uses a whole 4k of RAM

What means exactly user licence in Netware world? Its number of machines, or number of Nowell users accross machines, number of parallel users?
What is that trial eBay typical price, at least roughly, its expensive?
Could you write some tutorial how to setup it / use it?

ruthan wrote:

What means exactly user licence in Netware world? Its number of machines, or number of Nowell users accross machines, number of parallel users?

I'm actually not 100% sure, but I am quite certain that it is number of users that have successfully authenticated simulataneously -- i.e. number of simultaneous logins. I haven't tried to push it in the mock environment I have set up in VirtualBox (I haven't installed it on hardware yet).

ruthan wrote:

What is that trial eBay typical price, at least roughly, its expensive?

You can actually find it freely available online, at some archive organizations, and I do not feel bad about obtaining it for free, as Novell originally made it freely available themselves.

ruthan wrote:

Could you write some tutorial how to setup it / use it?

I actually hadn't thought of that, but may do it, as probably others would benefit... I'm kind of going through this blind myself, and initially had difficulty figuring out how to create shares, etc. I'll reply in this thread if I do.