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.

Would love to see some interviews etc with DJ if he's up for it

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...

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.

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

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 were the default movement keys, unlike these days where WASD is default.)

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.

Or from the Seinfeld episode "The Pool Guy" (Aired November 1995) which had a fictional movie called "Chunnel" -- probably based on the very same channel tunnel.

He most definitely is cooking something. Seen contributions from him to chocolate-quake: https://github.com/Henrique194/chocolate-quake/pull/60

As well as bug reports: https://github.com/Henrique194/chocolate-quake/issues/57

I personally would love to get some help with my chocolate Doom 3 BFG fork, specially with pesky OpenGL issues: https://github.com/klaussilveira/chocolate-doom3-bfg

I feel he's stepping his way to that, but Quake is an entire other world of complexity from DooM (which is simple enough that a 400+ page book can "explain" it and the OS and the computers it ran on).

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.

You can kinda solve that problem with STUN servers. Most games on Steam use Steam Datagram Relay, which also solves this: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/multiplayer/stea...

It's like in-engine Hamachi. Works really well with P2P games.

I wonder if there is a way to use tailscale to make it easy again?

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.

The turbulent times and the breakneck speed of computer development need to be taken into account. Not long before that computer networks were strictly corporate things installed by contractors choosing hardware, driver and software suppliers suitable for tasks performed by employees or students, and someone who installed it at home was the same kind of nerd who would drag an engine from the work into his room to tinker. Non-business-oriented software rarely cared about third party network functions. Then network card became a consumer device, and a bit later it became integrated and expected.

Also, Windows did not install TCP/IP components on computers without a network card (most of them until the Millennium era), it was an optional component. You could not “ping” anything, as there was no ping utility, nor libraries it could call. In that aspect, those network-less Windows systems were not much different from network-less DOS systems. The installer probably still works that way (or can be made to, by excluding some dependencies), but it's hard to find hardware without any network connectivity today. I wonder what Windows 11 installer does when there is no network card to phone home...

I used to use Trumpet Winsock with Windows 3.1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumpet_Winsock

Didn't Win95 get tcp from FreeBSD?

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.

Arguably it had a great deal to do with what we think of as a "virtual machine."

Virtual 8086 remapped all opcodes and memory accesses to let a program pretend to be on a single, real-mode 8086 when in reality it was one of many programs running in protected mode on a newer chip

AMD-V and whatever the Intel counterpart is do the almost exactly the same thing: re-map all ia32 and amd64 instructions and memory accesses to let a program pretend to be doing ring 0 stuff on an x86 box, when in reality it is one of many programs running with fewer privileges on a newer chip

There are a few more wrinkles in the latter case -- nested page tables, TLB, etc -- but it is the same idea from the viewpoint of the guest.

Not entirely related but Quake had a VM though, executing scripts written in QuakeC[0] which would drive the AI, game events, etc.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuakeC

And then you had Romero saying that Quake wasn't ambitious enough...

-------------------------- John-Tony12 27 minutes ago | parent | context | on: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack

Fascinating deep dive — shows how Quake.exe integrated its own TCP/IP stack, highlighting clever engineering and early game networking innovations.

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This is AI right? the em dash and the inane sycophantic reiteration