The Vanilla Utilities

[fraggle]

Ho ho ho! Santa fraggle here, back (after a 20 year hiatus) to bring you the first release of The Vanilla Utilities, a set of DOS APIs and command line tools for doing unusual things with vanilla Doom (and other Doom engine games). It's rather niche but there may be others out there who find some of these useful.

Download v1.0.0 here.

 

Included in this first release are:

• ipxsetup and sersetup - bugfixed and expanded versions of the IPX and serial/modem drivers originally included with Doom.

• parsetup - parallel port network driver, derived from the version from the idgames archive

• metanet - networking driver that combines other networking drivers into a packet forwarding network. This allows, for example, three players on an IPX network to be joined by a fourth on a serial cable.

• solo-net - null/standalone network driver that starts a network game without any real connection. Replicates the -solo-net parameter found in many Doom source ports. (Updated version of the one I released on idgames).

• analogjs - PC joystick driver with analog control that is more precise than Doom's built in joystick support.

• replay - demo replay tool that uses the external control API, so that demos can be "continued" by recording a new demo from an old one.

• statdump - external statistics driver that can dump a text summary. (Updated version of the previous tool I wrote)

• Full Turbo C source code for all of the above, including C APIs for Doom's networking, statistics and external control APIs.

 

I have plans for further expansion of the set of utilities and I'll be curious to hear people's suggestions.

[fraggle]

Thanks for the enthusiastic response, folks! As a follow-up, v1.1.0 is now out, with the following enhancements:

• Codebase now compiles successfully under OpenWatcom as well as Turbo C.

• VROTTCOM and VCOMMIT adapter drivers were added which allow Doom network drivers to be used to play Rise of the Triad and BUILD engine games such as Duke Nukem 3D. The video below shows VCOMMIT being used to play Duke3D with Fab n' Boris's old Doom network driver, DOOMATIC.

• The networking API was cleaned up, so that it's easier to write a client program that uses the Doom networking API.

• SERSETUP no longer requires MODEM.CFG to start, now supports the -player2 command line argument, and can start games with the version of SERSETUP bundled with Doom v1.9.

 

 

[Danfun64]

Does your version of ipxsetup include the XTTL changes? https://github.com/AXDOOMER/ipxsetup_xttl

[fraggle]

It includes almost everything - looking through the changes.txt files, I think the only thing that's currently missing is the ability to explicitly choose the player number. It should be straightforward enough to incorporate that feature.

[zokum]

Any updates planned for iFrag? That is within the scope for these utils :)

[Doomkid]

My apologies for the bump, but I figured this would be the right thread to ask gurus who actually understand how these things work on an internal level: @xttl's expanded version of IPXSETUP is known among vanilla enthusiasts at this point, but was anyone aware of [HCI]Mara'akate's expanded version called IPXNEW as well? It can be found at this link, alongside an expanded version of the 1.9 Doom exe that's also compatible with Doom 2, Heretic, Final Doom and even Chex Quest, and has some badass features like automatic loading of internal DeHackEd files. There's also a version of SETUP that's included and apparently expanded somehow, but I'm not quite sure how.

 

There's documentation included for both, but it seems like both the expanded Doom exe and the expanded IPXSETUP do different kinds of expansions.. Wondering is there's a way of integrating the two at all, or if they've maybe diverged too much for it to be possible?

 

At the very least, I wanted to bring these alternate expanded exes to light, at least around here - I only just discovered them today while searching for iFrag (which is also available at the same site) and thought there might be a high possibility that they aren't very well known vanilla utilities and that perhaps it might even lead to some sort of marriage between DOOM32.EXE and Mara'akate's DOOMNEW.EXE, as well as xttl's IPXSETUP and Mara'akate's IPXNEW.

 

I just wanted to share this here because it seems relevant to the vanilla utilities angle!

[Redneckerz]

3 hours ago, Doomkid said:

My apologies for the bump, but I figured this would be the right thread to ask gurus who actually understand how these things work on an internal level: @xttl's expanded version of IPXSETUP is known among vanilla enthusiasts at this point, but was anyone aware of [HCI]Mara'akate's expanded version called IPXNEW as well? It can be found at this link, alongside an expanded version of the 1.9 Doom exe that's also compatible with Doom 2, Heretic, Final Doom and even Chex Quest, and has some badass features like automatic loading of internal DeHackEd files. There's also a version of SETUP that's included and apparently expanded somehow, but I'm not quite sure how.

 

There's documentation included for both, but it seems like both the expanded Doom exe and the expanded IPXSETUP do different kinds of expansions.. Wondering is there's a way of integrating the two at all, or if they've maybe diverged too much for it to be possible?

 

At the very least, I wanted to bring these alternate expanded exes to light, at least around here - I only just discovered them today while searching for iFrag (which is also available at the same site) and thought there might be a high possibility that they aren't very well known vanilla utilities and that perhaps it might even lead to some sort of marriage between DOOM32.EXE and Mara'akate's DOOMNEW.EXE, as well as xttl's IPXSETUP and Mara'akate's IPXNEW.

 

I just wanted to share this here because it seems relevant to the vanilla utilities angle!

IPXNew might be mergeable, but DoomNew uses the original DMX sound engine, leading to legality issues.

 

I do have to say i do like your expanded interest in the vanills formats like these. Lets have a chat sometime, i think there is lots to talk and share to eachother :)

 

Mara also has enhanced Hexen/Heretic executables, useful for demorecording.

[fraggle]

On 10/25/2020 at 1:36 AM, Doomkid said:

My apologies for the bump, but I figured this would be the right thread to ask gurus who actually understand how these things work on an internal level: @xttl's expanded version of IPXSETUP is known among vanilla enthusiasts at this point, but was anyone aware of [HCI]Mara'akate's expanded version called IPXNEW as well? It can be found at this link, alongside an expanded version of the 1.9 Doom exe that's also compatible with Doom 2, Heretic, Final Doom and even Chex Quest, and has some badass features like automatic loading of internal DeHackEd files. There's also a version of SETUP that's included and apparently expanded somehow, but I'm not quite sure how.

Thanks for the suggestions. I wasn't aware of IPXNEW either. It looks like its changes are a subset of those found in xttl's extended ipxsetup. I added support for those extensions into my version of ipxsetup some months back.

 

 

[Doomkid]

Thanks very much for the info, fraggle. Looks like yours is the definitive version of IPXSETUP as of now!

[fraggle]

On 2/5/2020 at 7:16 PM, zokum said:

Any updates planned for iFrag? That is within the scope for these utils :)

Late reply but Dali is my effort in this area - it lets you connect to a DOSbox IPX server from a real DOS machine using a packet driver. Standardising around the DOSbox IPX protocol seems like a good idea to me because it opens up more possibilities for people to play together in different combinations, and each player can use their preferred setup. I've also been adding support for the same protocol to Chocolate Doom, and ipxbox is a DOSbox IPX server that can be bridged to a real IPX network.

 

So I might add something like a "udpsetup" in the future for completeness, but for now I'm going to point people to Dali. It's still very beta quality and definitely has some bugs and stability issues but I hope those can be fixed.

[fraggle]

This thread has been dormant for quite a while now, and there have been a whole bunch of changes since the last update, particularly this year. 

• Version 1.2.0 added support for the xttl IPXSETUP extensions, improved PARSETUP's performance and added support for response files and baked-in command line arguments (so you can for example make a driver always run doom2.exe, like the original sersetup and ipxsetup)
• Version 1.3.0 added SIRSETUP (a network driver for Serial Infrared / IrDA ports) and added background call answering to SERSETUP, so you can launch the game before the other player has called.

On 2/5/2020 at 7:16 PM, zokum said:

Any updates planned for iFrag? That is within the scope for these utils :)

Took a while, but I released Vanilla Utilities 2.0 last night. There's a new utility named udpsetup that is essentially this (here's a thread about it).

 

 

[Redneckerz]

Fraggle's giving DOS users a huge uptick with these things. @fraggle. Thank you for doing this!