It's amusing to me that in the 90s you could easily play Quake or Doom with your friends by calling their phone number over the modem whereas now setting up any sort of multiplayer essentially requires a server unless you use some very user-unfriendly NAT busting.
How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack
51–60 of 158 posts
Re: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack
#52Random 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.
MIT offers a Pirate Certificate: https://physicaleducationandwellness.mit.edu/about/pirate-ce...
Re: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack
#53It's amusing to me that in the 90s you could easily play Quake or Doom with your friends by calling their phone number over the modem whereas now setting up any sort of multiplayer essentially requires a server unless you use some very user-unfriendly NAT busting.
I wonder if there is a way to use tailscale to make it easy again?
Re: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack
#54I still get Google hits on my 25 year old DJGPP/NASM tutorial...
Re: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack
#55This 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.
Dial-up, has better latency, since their is no packet-switching. So it is slow, but not laggy.
Re: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack
#56It's amusing to me that in the 90s you could easily play Quake or Doom with your friends by calling their phone number over the modem whereas now setting up any sort of multiplayer essentially requires a server unless you use some very user-unfriendly NAT busting.
Glad you mentioned DOOM! Sometimes people forget that DOOM supported multiplayer as early as December 1993, via a serial line and February 1994 for IPX networking. 4 player games on a LAN in 1994! On release, TCP/IP wasn't supported at all, but as the Internet took off, that was solved as well. I remember testing an early-ish version of the 3rd party iDOOM TCP setup driver from my dorm room (10 base T connection) when I was supposed to be in class, and it was a true game changer.
Re: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack
#57Random 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.
I took an 8-week, 1-credit badminton course to fulfill my PE requirements. I wouldn't be surprised to find a marksmanship course.
Re: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Dial-up, has better latency, since their is no packet-switching. So it is slow, but not laggy.
Dialup has a ton of latency (100+ms), but little jitter.
Re: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So... Win32 runs in virtual mode. In 2025, we don't think of that as a Virtual Machine, but it totally is. Hardware access is trapped by the CPU and processed by the OS/DPMI server.
Re: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Berkeley, for disambiguation.
Oops, too late to edit my comment!