First post, by mike_canada
I don't have access to a 64-bit computer, but I have direct access to DOS and Linux and I can run DOS via DOSEMU and DOSBOX in Linux. With DOSEMU, I can pass a bootable floppy disk image to it and it can boot off of that quite fine.
I can even use the DOS 6.22 boot image found from:
https://www.allbootdisks.com/download/dos.html
as a boot disk.
Now I have a challenge.
I have pretty much figured out how to make the DOS duke nukem 3D game on a network, but I can only help people that run Linux and DOS because I can make easy-to-use scripts for both those operating systems. Part of the duke nukem network will involve going to a website, choosing a lobby, then a special file is to be executed.
Now, if people were to run my software in DOS (without running windows), I'd get them on the arachne web browser with the config automatically setup, so when the player selects the lobby, the browser automatically switches to the driver with no user intervention necessary.
In linux, people could use a regular browser, but when the user selects the lobby, they will be asked to download a file, then the user has to associate the download with the script, and I bet some people couldn't do that.
But what's even sadder is Windows 7 or higher (64-bit) because I have yet to figure out how to get real DOS games and DOS networking (0ver packet drivers) to work in that.
So the only thing I can think of now is that if users enter the lobby then users would associate the downloaded lobby file with a DOS emulator that contains the packet driver and loads the file somehow.
Also, because players don't want to wait extra time to play a game, I'll have to somehow come up with a way to make a bootable image that's a custom hard drive.
Plus on top of that, I might need to somehow instruct users to make another disk image that contains the game itself because the game cannot fit on a floppy. Then I gotta instruct users to somehow inject the downloaded file into the image. Then again I could try linking the user's current hard drive to the emulator if that works?
So in the end, my goal is this:
When users that don't use DOS only mode (which is 99% of the population) want to play a networked duke nukem game, they go to my website, select a lobby, then when the download box pops up, they associate it with a script that launches any virtual machine (like virtualbox, dosbox, dosemu, etc) which automatically boots, then loads a packet driver that has access to the internet, then loads my driver with the data from the config file then after that, it loads the duke nukem game. After the game is over, the virtual machine exits.
So far, I can tweak the contents in the floppy images from https://www.allbootdisks.com/download/dos.html but I cant figure out how to tweak their size.
Any ideas?