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How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack

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Re: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack

#31
post #16

Random drive-by nitpick: > From the beginning of the development, id had requested from djgpp engineers that their DPMI client would be able to run on djgpp's DPMI server but also Windows 95 DPMI server. I'm pretty sure that "DJGPP engineers" is just one guy, DJ Delorie. DJGPP was always open source so I bet he got some contributors, but if the rest of this sentence is true that "id has requested from djgpp engineers…

Completely off topic; So I just took a look at DJ’s website and he has a college transcript there. Something looked interesting. Apparently he passed a marksmanship PE course at the first year. Is that a thing in US? I don’t know, maybe its common and I have no idea. I’d love to have a marksmanship course while studying computer science though.

US colleges last one year longer, and the first year is more academically similar to the last year of high school in Europe.

Re: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack

#32

I learned to solder as a pre-teen so I could make a nullmodem :) Then I learned that resistors were a thing when I made a parallel port sound card (this thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing ). Fun times!

Really fun times. I “learned” to solder around that time and age also. Playing Mod files through a DIY version of that “thing” piped into a portable stereo speaker was awesome.

Years later I learned what flux was, and soldering became quite a bit better and easier.

Re: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I'm fairly certain that berkley sockets were used as a foundation to integrate a full network stack under winsockets so people wouldn't have to go buy things like Trumpet (Windows 3.1) and you could coax out messages saying as much from the commandline but Google is failing me (I'm sure most of this stuff is on usenet which no one seems to care about these days)

The history of the Windows TCP/IP stack went most likely like this: IBM (NetBEUI, no TCP/IP) -> Spider TCP/IP Stack + SysV STREAMS environment -> MS rewrite 1 (early NT, Winsock instead of STREAMS) -> MS rewrite 2 (make win2000 faster): https://web.archive.org/web/20151229084950/http://www.kuro5h...

It's interesting how STREAMS pervaded everything for a short while (Apple's Open Transport networking stack for System 7.5 and up was also based on STREAMS) but everyone almost immediately wanted to get rid of it and just use Berkley sockets interfaces.

Re: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack

#35
This article makes it seems like 1996 was ancient times. There was the internet then, browsers, Mac’s had a tcp stack for a while by then, quake was an extremely advanced game.

Yeah, the dos to windows transitions was a big deal, but it was a pretty ripe time for innovation then.

Re: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack

#36

Random drive-by nitpick: > From the beginning of the development, id had requested from djgpp engineers that their DPMI client would be able to run on djgpp's DPMI server but also Windows 95 DPMI server. I'm pretty sure that "DJGPP engineers" is just one guy, DJ Delorie. DJGPP was always open source so I bet he got some contributors, but if the rest of this sentence is true that "id has requested from djgpp engineers…

It was great indeed. DJGPP is how I learned to to program.

Re: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack

#37

This article makes it seems like 1996 was ancient times. There was the internet then, browsers, Mac’s had a tcp stack for a while by then, quake was an extremely advanced game. Yeah, the dos to windows transitions was a big deal, but it was a pretty ripe time for innovation then.

Yeah, but dial-up was slow, laggy, and what 95% of people used to access the internet in those days. Real-time gaming was not fun with anything that used it. I grew up in a rural area in the 1990s and was no match for people that started to get cable modems as time went on.

Re: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack

#38

Random drive-by nitpick: > From the beginning of the development, id had requested from djgpp engineers that their DPMI client would be able to run on djgpp's DPMI server but also Windows 95 DPMI server. I'm pretty sure that "DJGPP engineers" is just one guy, DJ Delorie. DJGPP was always open source so I bet he got some contributors, but if the rest of this sentence is true that "id has requested from djgpp engineers…

Amen to that! I think I remember there was some communication between ID and Charles Sandmann about CWSDPMI, so even though it's worded a bit strange for an open source project there's probably some thruth in it? Also a bit strange how the author is surprised about Quake running in a 'VM', apparently they don't really know about VM86 mode in x86 processors...

DPMI clients don’t run in a VM, though. They’re just a normal task like any other task / process in Windows.

Re: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack

#39
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't allowed a soldering iron as a kid, so I ended up just chopping and splicing a regular serial cable and turned it into a null modem, all so that I could play OMF2097 with my friends without having to share the same keyboard (we would always fight over right side, which defaulted to using the arrow keys for movement - and so the person who got the right side generally had the advantage, as back then arrow keys…

I wasn't allowed one either so I soldered with a screwdriver heated up on the gas stove when my parents weren't home...

That's pretty hardcore, respect :)
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