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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

#71

Post by djdelorie »

skrebbel wrote: post #13

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…

Back then, DJGPP was a much bigger group, and most of the Quake kudos go to Charles Sandmann, author of cwsdpmi, who worked directly with Id to help them optimize their code for our environment.

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

#72

Post by hylaride »

1718627440 wrote: post #55
hylaride wrote: post #37

Earlier 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.

> Dial-up, has better latency, since their is no packet-switching. So it is slow, but not laggy.

It was laggy as there was buffering and some compression (at least for later revisions of dial-up) that most definitely added latency.

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

#73

Post by cardiffspaceman »

eknkc wrote: post #16
skrebbel wrote: post #13

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.

My college required its graduates to pass a minimal swimming test. Just enough swimming ability to give a potential rescuer some extra time to effect the rescue, rather than have us go straight to the bottom of the sea. We all took a test in the first week or so. Those who failed had to take a course and retake the test.

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

#74

Post by skrebbel »

djdelorie wrote: post #71
skrebbel wrote: post #13

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…

Back then, DJGPP was a much bigger group, and most of the Quake kudos go to Charles Sandmann, author of cwsdpmi, who worked directly with Id to help them optimize their code for our environment.

Omg I’m totally starstruck now!

Purely out of curiosity, was that all a volunteer open source effort or was the entire DJGPP group acting as a consulting organization?

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

#75

Post by badocr »

bombcar wrote: post #68
jandrese wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was even more amazing is you could daisy chain serial ports on computers to get multiplayer Doom running. One or more of those links could even be a phone modem. Downside is that your framerate was capped to the person with the slowest computer, and there was always that guy with the 486sx25 who got invited to play.

Or slave two copies to yours and get "side view" which was only supported for a few releases IIRC - https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Three_screen_mode

Yes, Doom with multi-monitors! There's (at least) one video on Youtube showing it in action with 3 monitors plus a fourth one with the map: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3NQQ7bPf6U#t=1798.333333

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

#76

Post by djdelorie »

skrebbel wrote: post #74
djdelorie wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back then, DJGPP was a much bigger group, and most of the Quake kudos go to Charles Sandmann, author of cwsdpmi, who worked directly with Id to help them optimize their code for our environment.

Omg I’m totally starstruck now! Purely out of curiosity, was that all a volunteer open source effort or was the entire DJGPP group acting as a consulting organization?

The DJGPP project and its contributors were 100% volunteer. I'm sure some of the contributors took advantage of their involvement to obtain consulting gigs on the side (I did ;) but DJGPP itself didn't involve any. The Quake work was a swap; we helped them with optimizing, and they helped us with near pointers. Win-win!

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

#77

Post by badocr »

I recall reading about TCP/IP-powered Internet multiplayer DOS Quake in TECHINFO.TXT that shipped with the retail version of the game, and I quote:

  Beame & Whiteside TCP/IP
  ------------------------
  
  This is the only DOS TCP/IP stack supported in the test release.
  It is not shareware...it's what we use on our network (in case you
  were wondering why this particular stack).  This has been "tested"
  extensively over ethernet and you should encounter no problems
  with it.  Their SLIP and PPP have not been tested.  When connecting
  to a server using TCP/IP (UDP actually), you specifiy it's "dot notation"
  address (like 123.45.67.89).  You only need to specify the unique portion
  of the adress.  For example, if your IP address is 123.45.12.34
  and the server's is 123.45.56.78, you could use "connect 56.78".
I looked around a little and sure enough, a copy of the software was avaiable in a subdirectory of idgames(2?) at ftp.cdrom.com. I knew nothing about TCP/IP networking at the time, so it was a struggle to get it all working, and in the end, the latency and overall performance was miserable and totally not worth it. Playing NetQuake with WinQuake was a much more appropriate scenario.

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

#78

Post by mrguyorama »

sempron64 wrote: post #51

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.

You usually just need to forward a port or two on your router. That gets through the NAT because you specify which destination IP to forward it to. You also need to open that port in your Windows firewall in most cases.

Some configuration, but you don't have to update the port forwarding as often as you would expect.

The reason you can't just play games with your friends anymore is that game companies make way too much money from skins and do not want you to be able to run a version of the server that does not check whether you paid your real money for those skins. Weirdly, despite literally inventing loot boxes, Valve does not suffer from this sometimes. TF2 had a robust custom server community that had dummied out checks so you could wear and use whatever you want. Similar to how Minecraft still allows you to turn off authentication so you can play with friends who have a pirate copy.

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

sempron64 wrote: post #51

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.

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by jasomill »

EGreg wrote: post #69
ddtaylor wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I only have experience from M.U.G.E.N fighting engine with respect to DJGPP.

I remember back in the day using DJGPP (DJ Delorie) with the Allegro library (Shawn Hargreaves), building little games that compiled and ran on Windows and other OSes, and being part of the community. You can still play the little game I made in under 10K for the Allegro SizeHack competition in 2000: https://web.archive.org/web/20250118231553/https://www.oocit... Back then I was also writing a bunch of articles on ga…

I was, but my application was less fun: porting Perl code from Windows NT to MS-DOS to integrate with software that required direct hardware access to a particular model of SCSI card.

Worked great, and saved a bunch of time vs writing a VDD to enable direct hardware access from NTVDM or a miniport driver from scratch.

IIRC, the underlying problem was that none of the NT drivers for any of the cards we'd tested were able to reliably allocate enough sufficiently contiguous memory to read tapes with unusually large (multi-megabyte) block sizes.

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