First post, by ggorts
The Q2Dos project has archives which contained DOS binaries to play bot matches in Quake2 (Q2), Quake2 Mission Pack2 (MP2), and ActionQuake2 (AQ2). They require at least 128mb of RAM in DOSBox, but MP2 and AQ2 require 256mb; recommended to test with dosbox-x or ykhwong's build of dosbox, otherwise dosbox can be compiled with memory limit expanded. Their source code is partly derived from ID's Q2, Q2Dos, Acebot, the 3zb2 bot, and AQ2/LTK bot).
Q2Dos is available here:
https://bitbucket.org/neozeed/q2dos/downloads … S_EXE_LATEST.7Z
Notes on running mods: for CTF mode, the mod is downloaded as q2ctf102.zip. First, rename the CTF pak0.pak as pak1.pak so it doesn't overwrite the vanilla Q2 pak0.pak file under baseq2/. Second, add that pak1.pak file to the baseq2/ directory so there should now be 2 pak files there. The 3zb2 bot supports this mod.
The 3zb2 bot is a highly rated bot for DM and CTF modes (select mode by typing ctf 1 or ctf 0 at console in-game). Start a map via the bot match game menu , then type sv rspb 5 in the Q2 console to spawn 5 bots. Documentation is included, but the 3zb2 specific configuration file is now named 3ZB2.cfg.
AQ2 requires the AQ2 client named actn1ccl.zip. There is also a directory in that archive named players, and those files must be copied to the /players subdirectory under baseq2/ (preferably back up your Quake2 directory before adding or modifying files since this will change it to AQ2).
Additional maps and sounds are optional. If there are issues with the player skins then download the vwepfix and the vwepfix for AQ2.
Notes on djgpp 205/gcc423: there is no significant performance advantage over djgpp204/gcc295; however, there is a possible stability issue under stress which leads to a fpu stack overflow error in dosbox. Recommend building with the older gcc version since the resulting machine code is well tested. This result is particularly interesting because djgpp205 reportedly has CB Falconer's memory allocation improvement, but it doesn't seem to have a discernible effect in this particular case.
Troubleshooting: if connecting to a bot match there are DMA errors, then test with an older sound card in the dosbox emulation and/or try running the Q2 binary with the -dsp 2 parameter at the dos command line.