You almost certainly don't want to mess with modems and phone jacks.

Depending on the game, you might be able to get away with a "null modem" cable, which is really just a specific cable that will connect the serial ports of each computer. (Retro machine #2 will almost certainly have a suitable serial port already.)

Otherwise, just get an ethernet card for retro machine #1 and be done with it.

Easiest way is to use Dosbox Megabuild 6 with NE2000 emulation. Load the ODI drivers in Dosbox the same way as on a real machine and there you go.

This is probably way more complicated than you need, but it's possible to set up a local network over two modems connected via a long piece of normal telephone cable.

I did this back before I could afford a "real" network.

You can install dial up networking server on one PC and create a dial up connection on the other, and use manual AT commands to control the dialing and answering.

You'd need to find the AT command to disable dialtone detection for the client modem and then find the commands to "dial out"; usually that would be ATDT<fakenumber> on client and then, once it's dialing, answer the phone on the other end with ATA.

I'm sure there are more steps involved but that's the basics as I recall from ~20 years ago.

I just remembered... I do have a USB ethernet adapter that I could use for Retro PC #1. Supposing that I got drivers for that for Windows 98, how do I set up an IPX connection between that and PC #2?
I also have a modern PC running Windows 7, which has a virtual Windows 98 machine on it. Could I set up an IPX connection between PC #1 and that?

Sorry for all the annoying questions, I just have no experience with this and online tutorials and information is little help.

And for that DOSBox Megabuild 6... what is the difference between that and normal DOSBox's IPX emulation?
Ultimately I want to get games like NetKeen working over IPX.

I do have a serial null modem cable which works great for games like DOOM which support it... [warning, stupid question ahead] is there a way to emulate IPX over a serial null modem cable?

Megabuild 6 is very old and there is no point in using it anymore for anything.

If you're running DOSBox on all your computers, there is also no point in attempting to do anything special with IPX. Just use the IPX emulation in standard DOSBox. Tutorials for starting that up abound; see for instance https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Connectivity .

Trying to get IPX running in DOS is substantially more unpleasant. Is there something in particular that you want to run that can't use either a serial null modem cable or the standard windows TCP/IP ? I am unfamiliar with NetKeen. (And no, there is no way of emulating IPX over a null modem cable.)

Jorpho wrote:

Megabuild 6 is very old and there is no point in using it anymore for anything.

OK.

Jorpho wrote:

If you're running DOSBox on all your computers, there is also no point in attempting to do anything special with IPX. Just use the IPX emulation in standard DOSBox. Tutorials for starting that up abound; see for instance https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Connectivity .

Yeah, I've done that a billion times. It's just too boring, using real hardware is much more fun! 🤣

Jorpho wrote:

Trying to get IPX running in DOS is substantially more unpleasant.

Well, I guess "fun" depends on how you look at it...

Jorpho wrote:

Is there something in particular that you want to run that can't use either a serial null modem cable or the standard windows TCP/IP ? I am unfamiliar with NetKeen. (And no, there is no way of emulating IPX over a null modem cable.)

Yes. NetKeen uses the IPX code from DOOM. It's usually run over two computers running DOSBox (which is how I've always done it, works flawlessly), but a few people have gotten it to work over real DOS computers (http://www.pckf.com/viewtopic.php?t=3613&highlight=), albeit with much heartache setting up DOS networking. 😒

I just need a "quick and dirty" way of getting this to work. Doing it between PC #1 (with 3COM ethernet card) and PC #2 (with USB ethernet adapter) would be ideal. Alternatively, doing it betwteen PC #2 and my modern DOSBox PC would be fine too. I just have no idea where to start. If I just start hooking computers together with ethernet cables and setting up IPX networking in Windows 98, am I likely to get anywhere? 😦

Actually yes. DOS games usually work with Windows 98 IPX networks, so long as they run nicely in Windows. That was my usual method of running Dos networked games in the early 2000s.

keenmaster486 wrote:

I just need a "quick and dirty" way of getting this to work. Doing it between PC #1 (with 3COM ethernet card) and PC #2 (with USB ethernet adapter) would be ideal. Alternatively, doing it betwteen PC #2 and my modern DOSBox PC would be fine too. I just have no idea where to start. If I just start hooking computers together with ethernet cables and setting up IPX networking in Windows 98, am I likely to get anywhere? 😦

The USB network adapter is definitely not going to work without Windows running.

Also, if you don't have some kind of router to plug the network cables into, you're probably going to need a crossover network cable – much like a null modem cable, it's just like an ordinary cable but with some of the wires reversed. (Some networking hardware is "smart" enough to do the crossover internally, but I wouldn't trust that.)

Jorpho wrote:

The USB network adapter is definitely not going to work without Windows running.

Yeah, I got drivers installed for it in Windows 98.

Jorpho wrote:

you're probably going to need a crossover network cable

I do have one of those.

So I'm switching gears here: I want to focus solely on getting my DOS/Win98 laptop (PC #1, with USB ethernet adapter) networked with DOSBox running on a modern PC.

I'm having trouble understanding why this is required (even if it's very old) to network with a real DOS computer, and how it's different from DOSBox's built in IPX emulation. What is more, my modern computer runs Windows 7, which doesn't support IPX - do I have to run Windows XP to make it work?

I'm stabbing a bit in the dark here, but as per the Wiki page I linked to before:

DOSBox emulates outdated protocols and actually routes them to Internet's own IP protocol (TCP/IP for serial/modem emulation and the even better UDP/IP for IPX emulation).

A real DOS computer generally knows nothing about TCP/IP, so DOSBox's built-in IPX emulation would never be able to communicate with it. Presumably, if you use the NE2000 patch, a program attempting to use IPX in DOSBox will produce network traffic that a DOS computer will understand. So, no, this does not mean you need a version of Windows that supports IPX.

Also, to be clear, the NE2000 patch is included in the SVN Daum build (though it should work much the same as it did in the old Megabuild).

Yup. DOSBox IPX emulation is the IPX driver stack with IPX over IP tunneling. Your DOS PC will not do IPX over IP tunneling.

The "outdated" Megabuild mentioned earlier can do IPX pass-through however, and I did get that working with a DOS machine before and have even done this to transfer files through some DOS-based IPX file sending tool for when I had SMB problems. The SVN Daum can be overkill and ubggier.

However that was in the XP days. Not so certain that would work in 7 x64 or 10 anymore.

leileilol wrote:

The "outdated" Megabuild mentioned earlier can do IPX pass-through however, and I did get that working with a DOS machine before and have even done this to transfer files through some DOS-based IPX file sending tool for when I had SMB problems. The SVN Daum can be overkill and ubggier.

However that was in the XP days. Not so certain that would work in 7 x64 or 10 anymore.

Works, as it uses Winpcap.