Oh man, nevermind, that worked. I COULD KISS YOU!!! I won't, but I could!

Now, is it just as easy to get TCP-IP working?

Guess I spoke too soon. After adding those three lines, IPX works in quake but WFW 3.11 won’t load. If I rem out the three lines, WFW loads. Back to the drawing board. 🙁

You can start and stop IPX on the fly, why would you put that in your autoexec.bat ?

You can simply make "startipx.bat" and "stopipx.bat" containing the three lines to start and stop ipx when you don't need it anymore ^^

Deksor wrote on 2020-02-01, 22:05:

You can start and stop IPX on the fly, why would you put that in your autoexec.bat ?

You can simply make "startipx.bat" and "stopipx.bat" containing the three lines to start and stop ipx when you don't need it anymore ^^

It’s not as slick, but I guess it’ll have to do. What does the stopipx batch file look like? Not sure of the command that would end what the com files do.

IIRC, just type the commands in the opposite order with parameter "/u" to unload each of them.

Guybrush3pwood wrote on 2020-02-01, 16:59:

Oh man, nevermind, that worked. I COULD KISS YOU!!! I won't, but I could!

Now, is it just as easy to get TCP-IP working?

Just happy to help, No need for the affection 😉
TCP is totally different.

What you have actually done is load the files needed to connect to a Netware server (That's why the NWCliennt folder name)
We don't have any way of sharing files etc.

If you want TCP you need more software. Microsoft Network Client 3.0 or ftp via MTCP are common options these days but also need different drivers loaded.
or do what I do and setup TCP in Win3x.
ftp is easiest to get working with modern OS's and quicker, Win3x feels more fun/retro

I also think this is whats causing windows to hang. if you try win /n to go into windows and see if it hangs

chinny22 wrote on 2020-02-02, 12:47:

Just happy to help, No need for the affection ;) TCP is totally different. […]
Show full quote

Guybrush3pwood wrote on 2020-02-01, 16:59:

Oh man, nevermind, that worked. I COULD KISS YOU!!! I won't, but I could!

Now, is it just as easy to get TCP-IP working?

Just happy to help, No need for the affection 😉
TCP is totally different.

What you have actually done is load the files needed to connect to a Netware server (That's why the NWCliennt folder name)
We don't have any way of sharing files etc.

If you want TCP you need more software. Microsoft Network Client 3.0 or ftp via MTCP are common options these days but also need different drivers loaded.
or do what I do and setup TCP in Win3x.
ftp is easiest to get working with modern OS's and quicker, Win3x feels more fun/retro

I also think this is whats causing windows to hang. if you try win /n to go into windows and see if it hangs

A lot has happened since my last post. I'm no expert, but I suspected that my hang had something to do with loading my device driver and a conflict with whatever "NET START" was doing at the beginning of my autoexec.bat script. I REM'd it out as a test and sure enough, it wouldn't hang. So I decided it may be an issue with my NIC. Swapped out the PCI NIC I had in there with an older ISA NIC, thinking that if it could autodetect it, it may be more compatible. Long story short, same issue. So since I had more PCI NICs than ISA NICs, I went back to a PCI NIC, just a different one because why not? Now, this happens:

If I run my IPXSTART.bat script, I can go into Quake in DOS and play a network game no issues. When I exit out of Quake and run IPXSTOP.bat, then try to launch into WFW 3.11, it crashes and reboots my machine, at which point I'm able to type WIN and get in. Simple running IPXSTART.bat and then IPXSTOP.bat doesn't result in the same issue, I have to actually go into a game, play it against another networked computer, and then exit. Typing WIN will crash the system every time. Tried your suggestion by typing WIN /N and still got the crash.

So this three file IPX thing just does not seem to get along with NET START and Windows 3.11. Not really sure what to do about it at this point, but if you have any ideas I'm open to trying them.

It's strange as the 3 files loaded for dos gaming should happily coexist with windows, but that doesn't help you .

Quick and dirty fix is only load whichever you need. Even though my ipxstart and net start work happily together I only load them when needed. In my case its to free up conventual memory but still it's pretty rare I'll need windows networking and play a network game in the same session and if you do a quick reboot should be enough.

The bigger question is do you have/want networking up and running in windows? if you dont you can leave Net Start disabled as it's only needed for Windows, It wont stop dos network gaming from working in fact It'll free up some resources.
If you do want networking up and running in windows long term thats cool, maybe sort that out without ipxstart loaded first and see if windows behaves then see if it gets along with ipxstart.

elianda wrote on 2017-09-22, 04:36:

Ethernet FRAME type is set to the same on all participating computers, the line looks like:
FRAME ETHERNET_802.2

Thanks! This specific line helped me out with my issue! I’m doing a retro network with 2 old mac’s and a retro pc win98 and couldn’t play C&C (1995) cross-platform. Only the mac’s could join each other, not the pc. I had ipx installed on all machines but thanks to you I changed the ipx ethernet settings from 802.3 to 802.2 and then the pc was able to see and join the game! Thank you so much👍

Here it is 😊

How did I not think of that!?
I got a G4 to try out mac versions of games but never thought about C&C and that's my all time favourite game.
and it never crossed my mind to try networking mac and dos games, this is an awesome idea!!!

chinny22 wrote on 2019-04-29, 19:38:

I've attached all 3 in a zip here for anyone else in the future. LSL and IPXODI are the final versions, PNPODI probably is but cant confirm
lsl.com, 2.11
ipxodi.com, 3.00 Beta 5

I was tinkering with my IPX network to get a game working and I found that I have even newer versions of these tools. These were part of the last VLM for DOS package (Netware 4.11) before they moved to the CLIENT32 system.

LSL - v2.20 (96-04-01)
IPXODI - v3.03 (96-06-11)
NETBIOS - v.3.18 (96-06-11)

Thought it would be appropriate to necro this post for the sake of preserving and sharing these programs 😀

Depending on your card using Client32 may bring some benefits even if you're not using NetWare File & Print services. Client32 and its 32bit ODI drivers and IPX/SPX stack (and TCP/IP stack if you install that) run in protected mode using extended memory which leaves you with more free conventional or upper memory to allocate to other things. If you've got EMM386 loaded Client32 should use around 3K of upper memory, if not it will use around 4K of conventional memory IIRC. File & Print services live in CLIENT32.NLM which you can just delete from \novell\client32\startnet.bat if you don't need it along with probably some other NLMs. The TCP/IP stack works pretty well but is mostly useful for winsock apps, not much DOS stuff supports it.

For file sharing over IPX there is Mars NWE, a NetWare server implementation for Linux from the 90s. Seems to work OK on the latest Raspbian thanks to some work someone put in to modernizing the build system about a decade ago. I've put the final version with my setup notes up on github.

Thanks Hezus!
Doubt it'll make any difference for basic dos gaming needs, but I get a warm fuzzy feeling from running the latest versions of long dead software and have already "upgraded" all my dos rigs 😀