Hi,
I have a dedicated linux based web server that I'd like to set up as a dosbox IPX server. Does anyone know if this is possible or how I'd go about this?
Thanks
That's very vague - what exactly do you try to achieve?
To make linux understand ipx you will only have to type
modprobe ipx
, but that wouldn't get you very far, because ipx-packets aren't routed through the internet.
You can try to install dosbox on your server and start your game in server-mode in it, perhaps without sound and highest frameskip possible.
Well the problem is because it's a remote server, I only have SSH access so I can't run DosBox so I need a was of starting an IPX server from just a shell.
With all ipx-based network games that I know, you have to start a server on one machine, if you can't do that on your webserver, you'd have to setup the server as an ipx-router, which is not a trivial task (at least, when you're not in a netware-environment.)
Like I said before, ipx-packets aren't routed through the internet, so you'd have to tunnel them through tcp/ip-packets.
Chances to get that working are merely existant, I'd suggest forgetting it.
DOSBox tunnels IPX through TCP/IP. This means you just need a TCP/IP connection.
Start DOSBox on the server and run IPXNET STARTSERVER.
Then connect all DOSBox machines to that server by typing IPXNET CONNECT <IP>
Yeah, that's all very well in theory but when you only have SSH access to a server you can't run dosbox, so you can't start an IPX server. A sort of cutdown dosbox that you can run from SSH and just serves as an IPX server would be nice.
Is it just a matter of being able to have DOSBox run those commands once it starts? If so, you can set up a dosbox.conf with an autoexec section that automatically runs those commands for you. The only way to then shut it down, though, would be to kill the DOSBox process.
You'd also need some SDL output method that works for you. Try "export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=dummy", it seems to route all output to nirvana.
You know, it might be meaningful to implement output=none as a valid option (if it isn't already).
And how would you get keyboard input to the program then...
You wouldn't. As I said, it'd only be useful for running batch scripts and whatnot.
