Q(emu) and network setup : anyone succeded?

[tjr]

Hi,
as I am blessed with a Mac, I have to resort to Q to run Orion2 in Win95b-DOS. Singleplayer works fine if a bit slow on an emulated ~50MHz machine.

However, try as I might, I could not get Windows to recognize the network card. Asking on the qemu forum didn't help [1]. qemu on Linux/PPC is also an option, but I haven't yet toyed with that.

* Has anybody else succeded at such a setup?
* Which versions did you use, exactly how did you install Win, and what did you put on the Q/qemu command line?
* Where does Kali/Dosbox come in? Do I still need Windows running?
If I'm guessing correctly, basically all you need is to switch IPX traffic from one emulated network of emulated hosts to another - what did you use for this? (I can handle TCP/IP.)
* What about execution speeds?
* How do you chat to negotiate a game start? I certainly don't want that inside the emulation.

1: http://qemu.dad-answers.com/viewtopic.php?t=1889

[Lord Brazen]

Hi,

I'm not a Mac person but I do know this. There is a Mac version of DOSBox. It should allow you to play Orion2 over the internet with many of the users on this forum. Quite a few of us use DOSBox to play.

The only problem for you would be locating opponents. Currently many of us use Kali to chat and hook up with opponents. There was at one time an unofficial Mac Version of Kali. If you can locate that, maybe it will work well enough to let you join the Moo2 chat channel.

I don't think you need Qemu unless you want to run the windows version of Kali in it just to chat.

Best of luck.

[tjr]

Thank you for your quick reply.

I found dosbox for mac and it turned out to be painfully slow (much worse than Q). I haven't yet tested its networking because the Windows NIC driver decided to work on Q (I don't really know why).

So I'd prefer to first look into a way to bridge IPX over IP between Q and DosBox. (Has anybody ever done that?)

In any case, I searched the web a bit for Dosbox.conf tweaking to make it faster:

fullscreen=true
fullresolution=0x0
frameskip=10 #default 0
scaler=none
core=simple #dynamic works only x86 on x86
cycles=auto
nosound=true
rate= 11025 # set all *rate's to the same value
sbtype=none
ipx=true

[tjr]

Well, running Win95 and Kali inside Q doesn't work, Kali keeps complaining about failed firewall tests and most of the time can't connect to the chat server.

Actually, there are 3 firewalls and 2 router involved: firewall/router at the transition between real and emulated hardware, OS X firewall, router/firewall in the DSL box. I can brigde individual ports (TCP and UDP) or open them, respectively, but Kali shatters all hope.

So Q/qemu should be viable only against other Q/qemu users. In that case you can bridge at the ethernet level between two virtual networks with "-net socket listen/connect" and simply start a LAN game using IPX/SPX. (untested)

http://people.redhat.com/berrange/olpc/ ... ridge.html
http://qemu.org/qemu-doc.html#SEC20
(Note OS X does not have the mentioned tun/tap devices.)

[tjr]

I asked on the dosemu forum, it seems a dynamic core for PowerPC (read, Macs except for macbooks) isn't to be seen anytime soon, and connecting qemu with dosbox is deemed somewhat a kruft. So, no networked Orion for mac users, except if they manage to convince windows users to use qemu.

http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=13456
[/list]