DOSBox IPXNET to real IPX network gateway

This is a small program which contains parts from DOSBox sources which enables it to act as a IPXNET server where DOSBox(es) can connect to. Besides being a dedicated server it also mirrors the IPX packets between a real physical ethernet network where real DOS computers can be connected to. This allows playing IPX games between real computers on one end and DOSBox emulators at another end.

Compiling

Ipxgw requires libpcap, SDL 1.2, and SDL_net libraries with headers installed besides g++ and standard C headers to compile. If you are running Debian or Ubuntu, install requirements by running:

sudo apt install build-essential libpcap-dev libsdl-net1.2-dev 

Then just:

make

There is also autotools support added.

Usage

If you are running "modern" IPX network at your LAN, then you just need to define the interface where your IPX network is. In case the interface is eth0, run:

ipxgw eth0

Because low level packet capture is required, superuser privileges are normally needed. Use sudo if needed.

UDP port 213 is used by default and can be changed using -p option.

If your computers in real network are running Novell raw IEEE 802.3 IPX stack instead of Logical Link Control (IEEE 802.2), then you need to change the frame structure with Ipxgw -r switch. For example:

ipxgw -r eth0

If your computers in real network are running Ethernet II IPX stack instead of IEEE 802.x, then you need to change the frame structure with Ipxgw -e switch. For example:

ipxgw -e eth0

Ethernet II also adds dynamic IPX node number allocation on the host network, to prevent conflicting IPX node numbers.

More information at Wikipedia.

To see other available parameters, use -h for help.

DOSBox configuration

More comprehensively documented in DOSBox Wiki. This is a short summary:

First, enable IPX. Ensure you have the following in DOSBox configuration:

[ipx]
ipx=true

Then run the following on DOSBox where 10.0.0.1 and 213 are the IP address of the machine running Ipxgw and Ipxgw port number:

IPXNET CONNECT 10.0.0.1 213

Background

We were lazy and so config.h has some hard-coded values. They should suffice for most users and the code compiles and works at least with both AMD64 Linux system and 32-bit Raspberry Pi.

This is untested with combination of multiple real DOS computers, but it works with at least one. Problem might also be if you use a switch and not a simple old hub with those multiple computers because some packets might not be visible to the gateway and therefore not sent to DOSBox(es).

You might ask, why do this? Well, there exists NE2000 driver for DOSBox but that does not work over the Internet - it allows only a local DOS computer to talk with a local DOSBox. This is the only way to allow remote DOSBox people to connect with your real DOS computer to play IPX games, as long as you can run the server.

The code could be improved a lot as it was just quickly hacked together and then made to work with help of some wireshark debugging. Feel free to improve it as the license allows.

License

Copyright (C) 2015, 2023 Kati Salin Copyright (C) 2020 Joel Lehtonen

Licenced under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Contains parts from DOSBox source code by The DOSBox Team, under GPLv2