IIRC that patch relies on winpcap which is discontinued and according to rumours doesn't work well with Vista and above due to relying on NDIS 5.x while Vista and above are NDIS 6.x. Likely BS since I haven't seen any issues and the Winpcap documentation states otherwise.
Npcap is active, requires NDIS 6 so Vista and above but it's not open source and it does have license limitations.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nmap/npcap/master/LICENSE
Another issue with using pcap is with wifi, it doesn't work so slirp would be better.
Winpcap
Latest Stable Release: 4.1.3
The current and last WinPcap release version is 4.1.3. The 4.1.x versions contain the following imp […]
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Latest Stable Release: 4.1.3
The current and last WinPcap release version is 4.1.3. The 4.1.x versions contain the following improvements:
Support for Windows XP, Vista, 2008, Windows 7, 2008R2 64 bit, Windows 8 and Server 2012
Allows remote capture to work with Wireshark
Based on libpcap 1.0
WinPcap 4.x does not support Windows 3.1, 95, 98, or ME.
Previous Stable Release: 3.1
This version contains substantial bug fixes and extensions above the 3.0 release:
based on libpcap 0.9.3, with many fixes and extensions above the older version
dial-up connections (e.g. PPP) can be captured on Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003, as well as Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Me, which were supported by previous releases
"can't get a list of interfaces" error fixed
As with anything being added to DOSBox it's all about game support, host OS support, who is going to maintain it in DOSBox and whether it's worth adding a feature that is rarely needed for DOS games.
I will say that having users install a pcap driver every time they install DOSBox and/or DOSBox requiring it on execution or heck even having it enabled by default is not a good idea. Another not great idea is recommending people install a discontinued winpcap and I'm not sure how I feel about recommending using ncap for an open source project.
The original patch, pcem, dosbox-x all based their NE2000 support off of Bochs.
I believe pcem and qemu are possibly using libslirp https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/slirp/libslirp
It's possibly libslip is Vista+ as of the below commit.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/slirp/libslirp … 39112b6da25cc0d
inet_pton - Vista+
inet_ntop - Vista+
Mabye can be worked around by disabling IPV6 if <Vista or by using inet_ntoa instead unless Qbix wants to make DOSBox only work on Windows Vista and above. DOSBox doesn't need IPv6 anyway. The OS should provide IPv4 to DOSBox.
Slirp would be ideal since no pcap required and should work for gaming to connect to a remote server by default and then a port forward config setting to allow inbound. The only issue would be IPX to physical machines since SLIRP is TCP and UDP only. For any other use people would have to use pcap, be limited to wired and have to troubleshoot pcap issues.
Personally I'd like NE2000 support but it's a "nice to have" not a necessity.