With real old hardware this should be asked in Marvin.

you need a tunnel, but ipx might not take the drops and latencies of the internets well

collector wrote:

With real old hardware this should be asked in Marvin.

But this is also DOSBox, and the question is specifically for software, not hardware (we don't care about hardware here as long as it's there) - so I thought maybe the overarching DOS category would work.

mrau wrote:

you need a tunnel, but ipx might not take the drops and latencies of the internets well

OK, so how do I set up this "tunnel" and what is it? Also, I have a 100 megabits connection so I wouldn't worry too much about latency.

check hamachi or openvpn, if youre savvy with linux you can do a tunnel by hand

keenmaster486 wrote:

Is there something on the real hardware end that can fool a DOS IPX game into thinking it's connected via an IPX network to the DOSBox computer over TCP/IP?

No but it's certainly possible for a concept. Kali did this in the day TCPing IPX to make those DOS IPX games possible to play online (natively though).

OK, so how do I set up this "tunnel" and what is it?

You'd need another PC (presumably with Linux), that your DOS/W9x machine will be connected to thinking it is the other player's PC. But in reality, all IPX packets will be tunneled through the internet to the other player.

This way you don't have to modify your "real hardware" PC in any way.
Now, I can't tell you how to do this exactly. But in principle it is possible.
Maybe you should ask on some Linux networking forum.

Also, I have a 100 megabits connection so I wouldn't worry too much about latency.

It's not bandwidth you need, it's low latency, and that is always quite large in the Internet when compared to LAN.
Old games weren't prepared for that in a way that all "internet-ready" games are.