I might have found a solution to my woes for windows users.

In case anyone needed a refresher, I plan to make a DOS duke nukem commit driver for the original Duke Nukem 3D that would work on all today's networks. I can get the networking to work in pure DOS mode and in DOSBOX under linux. I also use mTCP tools to test underlying network issues.

So I now introduce DOSBOX-X to my emulator portfolio. I downloaded the 32-bit windows version (for windows XP) and the basic DOS stuff runs ok so far within WINE in linux (as linux is my host OS). Only think different is the dos editor. it seems to load a special freedos editor but thats ok.

So now, networking is a problem in DOSBOX-X.

I have a choice of 2 drivers to use for DOSBOX-X. Slirp or Pcap. I tried Slirp and that failed completely. I then go to Pcap and assigned IRQ 11 to the ne2000 virtual network adapter.
Then in DOSBOX-X, I load ne2000.com with the correct parameters and it returns the same mac address as in the dosbox-x config file. I then run mTCP tools pkttool driver (using scan as parameter) to see if the packet driver works and it seems to detect it.

I tried a few other things which all met with failure:

1. I ran DHCP and after 3 tries, it claimed there was no response.

2. I modified the config pointed to by the mtcpcfg environment variable and I copied the IP information from my real network card (found via linux ipconfig command) to the config file and used 8.8.8.8 as the DNS resolver IP. (that's google's DNS IP). Then I tried mTCP's ping utility and it couldn't find a response at all.

Is there something I'm doing wrong in my DOSBOX-X config or do I need to modify wine configuration or even the windows registry? (wine has its own windows registry: regedit)