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First post, by thrawn235

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Hello all,

I am trying to develop a dos game with networking support. i have a bit of experience with game engine design and graphics programming in dos, but i have no idea how to even attempt a network engine.
There seem to be several options, packet driver and the windows networking client first and foremost. But it is extremely hard to find programming guides or API documentation online.

Maybe some of you know how to do it or point me in the right direction.

I have primarily two questions. what network system (packetdriver, win client etc) should i use for a game (should be small, simple and fast) ?
And where can i find some hints at actually implementing an interface for it ?

I use djgpp (c++) but i can also write functions in assembly or use inline assembly so thats not a problem.

Dont know where to post programming topics here, that have nothing to do with dosbox per se. But you guys helped me before with vesa (thanks), so im posting it here this time.

Reply 1 of 4, by GigAHerZ

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Mr. Brutmann with mTCP stack might be helpful. It works on top of packet driver and provides TCP/IP stack.
And of course, it's a modern approach to do this.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - And i intend to get every last bit out of it even after loading every damn driver!

Reply 2 of 4, by doshea

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Will the game support Internet play, or just LAN play? A TCP/IP stack is important for Internet play (unless you depend on the user to run inside an emulator or use some sort of separate routing tool that forwards packets over the Internet), but I expect that it would take up significantly more RAM than just a packet driver by itself. Using TCP/IP has the benefit that you can find a lot of information online about how it works too!

Reply 3 of 4, by BloodyCactus

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since your using djgpp, just remember all those packet drivers are realmode and when receiving/sending, use lot of interrupts so your going to spend a good bit of time switching to v86/realmode to use callbacks for the packetdriver which can be really costly.

--/\-[ Stu : Bloody Cactus :: [ https://bloodycactus.com :: http://kråketær.com ]-/\--

Reply 4 of 4, by doshea

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BloodyCactus wrote on 2021-03-01, 13:00:

since your using djgpp, just remember all those packet drivers are realmode and when receiving/sending, use lot of interrupts so your going to spend a good bit of time switching to v86/realmode to use callbacks for the packetdriver which can be really costly.

Are there any good 32-bit options? I seem to remember Novell had a DOS client they referred to as 32-bit, I don't know how much of it was 32-bit and whether they provided e.g. the ability to use IPX from 32-bit code without the switching to real mode?

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