Online Wing Commander Milestone Reached (May 2, 2005)

Penta2 said:
A related question: Is there any prospect of seeing MyJEMM for WinXP, so those of us with modern PCs might be able to go back and play games like Strike Commander?
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Yeah, myJEMM was a vital solution for getting the games running prior to the latest DOSBox, but it's just another option now. The author of myJEMM said it would have to be rewritten in a new way from scratch to work with XP, and since DOSBox plays Strike Commander and every other game so well, I doubt we will see an update.

Starkey said:
I currently use MyJEMM to play Armada (well, since I own a Win98 Pentium 166 I can even play it on pure DOS)...

However, since I´ll need the internet for the online games pure DOS is ruled out.

So, if I understood right, this thing will only work with DOSBox, right? What about MyJEMM?
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As Hades said, myJEMM is lacks the IP tunneling that DOSBox has. You also need a significantly more powerful computer for this, since myJEMM was more of a patch and DOSBox is an entire emulator.

FlashFire82 said:
this still seems a little rough. I do understand that I'm probably a little low on the power aspect on this computer... but I'm wondering... it only seemed to run choppy pushing keys on the keyboard (i.e. flight control w/ kb was not smooth), the sound I can live with. I wonder if it will operate more smoothly with a joystick? Hm... must start experimenting...
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If it's choppy when you move the fighter with a keyboard, it will still be a little choppy with a joystick. There is an improvement, but it does not completely smooth out choppy input related to the power requirements for the emulation.
 
More updates on the Armada DosBox front:

Thanks to a couple of productive coding nights (insomnia decided to keep me awake), i managed to code into DosBox the necessary NetBIOS routines that finally allows Multiplayer Armada to run. There are still a few bugs to be taken care of, but i hope to fix these relatively soon. In any case, results are optimistic! (pic) (pic)

Regarding the gameplay improvements, to make the game more tolerant to lag... well, there may not be much that can be done, as the game insists on synchronizing everything. However, IPX code was slightly changed in DosBox CVS, which may or may not help things slightly in the end. I am still looking into those synchronization errors we encountered during testing a while back, these i might be able to solve.

As for separate floppy / CD versions of the IPX and joystick patches; although i haven't received much feedback on these Armada patches, the feedback i got indicated that the floppy patch works just fine on the CD version. This being the case, it seems to be that maintaining two different versions of the patches would be more trouble than it's worth, so i probably won't be creating a separate CD patch unless there is a good reason to do so.

Slightly off-topic news regarding NetBIOS coding: although my priority is Armada first and foremost, i think i am close to running Syndicate: American Revolt (a few more NetBIOS functions need coding). These may be good news to other retro gamers out there who look forward to challenge each other in this classic Bullfrog game :)

Anyway, i hope to be able to declare the code ready soon, as i am eager to test Armada Campaign mode in an real internet game ;-)

Mario
 
HCl said:
More updates on the Armada DosBox front:

Thanks to a couple of productive coding nights (insomnia decided to keep me awake), i managed to code into DosBox the necessary NetBIOS routines that finally allows Multiplayer Armada to run. There are still a few bugs to be taken care of, but i hope to fix these relatively soon. In any case, results are optimistic! (pic) (pic)

Anyway, i hope to be able to declare the code ready soon, as i am eager to test Armada Campaign mode in an real internet game ;-)
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This is incredible news. Even being able to just do Quick Combat campaigns against eachother would be super.
 
Alright, i've been testing Armada NetBIOS for a bit and fixed whatever problems i could find in my NetBIOS implementation... so now it's the time to test things online and see how things go. All my tests have been done with three instances of DosBox on the same computer, an Athlon 1.4, so these are not optimal testing conditions.

I uploaded here the current version of my DosBox NetBIOS implementation. Using this new EXE should allow Armada to play online with no problems. If anyone feels up to it, grab the new DosBox EXE and let me know if you run into any problems. This EXE is based on the latest CVS version, where IPX code has been changed. The most significant change for the end user is that IPX tunneling is now done by UDP instead of TCP (port remains 213, iirc)... so configure your firewalls accordingly.

Also, if anyone who is going to be on #wingnut tomorrow (Sunday) is available to test this with me, please let me know and we'll see how the patch handles and what can be done to improve it.

Edit: At the moment, the patch is Armada-specific, so it lacks the necessary functionality to run other NetBIOS games.

Mario
 
if you use GIT (gamers ipx tunnel), it allows playing ipx games over the internet just by tunneling your ipx lan into someone else's ipx lan.

netbios (and other protocols) are included in the tunneling. i've played old games with dosbox like this already.

that's just an aside though...

it's really cool that a more native solution is being worked on. i'm impressed :)

-scheherazade
 
HCl working on a high res Kilrathi saga? Some of us with LCD screens would still love to go back and play this game.
 
Yesterday night, Chris and i were able to test the NetBIOS code with very good results. :) Although i will continue to improve my code, i would say that playing Armada online using NetBIOS is pretty stable now. I will be making further updates as progress is made.

As for WC1 High-res... that project is currently on hold, although it has not been abandoned and i do intent to resume it sometime in the future. Earlier implementations had some issues i am not happy about, mainly due to limitations of DirectX 5. This will force me to dig deeper into the EXE and either patch the code to a higher DirectX version or replace everything and use OpenGL in my DLL patch.

No idea when i will be resuming work on this patch, however, as i have other mods planned for the near future.

Mario
 
HCl said:
Yesterday night, Chris and i were able to test the NetBIOS code with very good results. :) Although i will continue to improve my code, i would say that playing Armada online using NetBIOS is pretty stable now. I will be making further updates as progress is made.
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Yeah, it was great. Fairly smooth, and both the strategic sector mode and cooperative gauntlet worked very well. Unless you anticipate an updated patch in the next few days, we'll probably try to get some more screenshots and further test it this weekend, before doing a full update Sunday or Monday.
 
Actually i should have a new version of the NetBIOS code ready by tomorrow, but most changes concern NetBIOS sessions, which are needed by games like Syndicate: American Revolt. Armada doesn't use NetBIOS session services, so in theory it shouldn't be affected it in any way... although it's always good to test it a bit, to make sure the new code didn't break anything.

I can probably stop by #wingnut around midnight-1am GMT (working this weekend, so it will be difficult to get there before that).
 
My weekend end up going down the drain, so not much progress on DosBox was made. I'll see if i can finish the bugfixes i was working on these next few nights. Playing Magic Carpet 1 in NetBIOS mode now works as well, tho.

Maj. Striker: Ok, i'll let you know when i have my next DosBox build ready, maybe we can do some testing by then.

LeHah: DosBox has been able to play Syndicate for some time now. Grab version 0.63 from their site and give it a try, it should run right out of the box.
 
I'm getting a bit of a problem with this... When I enable IPX in my dosbox.conf I always get an error message saying "Network driver detected. Cannot switch to protected mode safely." every time I try to run Armada... Any ideas on how to fix this?
 
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