Your sound card works perfectly. Just not the network card.

December 31, 2005 1:43 PM

1990sGamingFilter: I'm trying to set up some LAN gaming with some old IPX-dependent games (primarily WarCraft II: TOD). I've installed the IPX protocol under my network connection, but the game still can't find the network. I'm using a D-Link DI-524 wireless router, which I suspect does not support IPX natively. Is there an emulator or something I can use?
posted by DrJohnEvans to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

In the old days there was a tool called Kali that would let you do IPX over TCP. I see they're still in business; maybe something there will help you out?
posted by Nelson at 1:49 PM on December 31, 2005

Response by poster: Actually, we're looking at Kali right now. It looks like it may be a bit of overkill—ideally I'd just like to use my LAN instead of going through Kali servers—but it may have to be a last resort.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 1:56 PM on December 31, 2005

Best answer: Kali could be overkill.

Check out DOSBOX for old school gaming. It's got IPX/SPX into it.

Be sure that all the computers are on the same segment, by the way. I don't believe modern routers can route IPX/SPX, and so not having all the machines on the same collision domain could be a problem.

Oh, fantastic. DOSBOX has IPX/SPX over UDP emulation.
posted by id at 3:36 PM on December 31, 2005

As I remember, way back in the DOS days your network card would ship with a separate DOS IPX driver. Programs would access the IPX protocol via calling a certain interrupt handler with the right parameters in the CPU registers. This is how things were done back then.

To the best of my knowledge, enabling IPX in windows does not enable such an interrupt handler.

My guess is that you'll have to boot into a DOS-like environment. Maybe this will help? It's a boot disk with IPX support for a bunch of ethernet cards.

Good luck, and hopefully there's a simpler solution than what I'm suggesting. I know I've seen DOS Netware utilities running under windows in the past. Maybe Novell's Netware drivers will add that interrupt handler?
posted by mragreeable at 3:39 PM on December 31, 2005

We tried this a couple weeks ago. Same problem. We had to disable the gigabit ethernet card on my desktop to get it to work. If you have more than one network card, you might have to disable the one not being used. Got it to work fine after that w/o Kali. This probably won't help if your router doesn't support it, though.
posted by starman at 3:47 PM on December 31, 2005

Of course, the simplest (but not cheapest) solution would be the battle.net edition. Doesn't help you with other games of that era, though.
posted by squidlarkin at 8:52 PM on December 31, 2005

Response by poster: Update: DOSBOX works. It's a bit of a pain because of all the setup and manual IPX configuration. There's also a definite performance lag, even after overclocking the DOSBOX CPU to its maximum. But it works!

Further bulletins as events warrant.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 1:39 PM on January 1, 2006