Red Alert / Red Alert II / Tiberium Sun: Overriding wsock32.

[Gert van den Berg]

Background:
Red Alert / Red Alert II / C&C / Tiberium Sun uses IPX for LAN play.
According to AppDB, this works, at least for Red Alert II (Orginal RA
is not on the first page of Google results...), but it requires Wine
to be run as root.

Since I do not have IPX installed and I'm not normally in a mood to
recompile my kernel, and the Windows users that I want to play against
do want to install IPX, I downloaded a patched wsock32.dll from
http://www.understorm.net/ . According to the site, it lets the games
multiplayer run over UDP.

Without the patched DLL, RA2 does not enter the LAN screen, while with
the patch it actually enters it. I cannot see games though.

Now the question:
When setting the override for wsock32 in WineCfg, Wine warns that Bad
Things(TM) may happen. What happens if I override wsock32? Is it where
Wine interface with the native networking?

Is there any way to emulate IPX over IP on Linux? And will it talk
with the modified Winsock DLL?

Is there a possibility to (in the future) include (optional) IPX
emulation over IP? (I think Dosbox allow that, an it might be handy
under Vista / XP without IPX installed as well...)

If IPX is needed, is it possible to run it as a normal user? (Gentoo)

Note: My Red Alert comes from the Fisrt Decade bundle. (It has a few
patches from http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/cnc ... files.html
applied (none, except for the LAN patch for RA2 (which does not
overwrite any files) and I have normal Red Alert updated to 3.03 (with
wsock32.dll for 3.03))

PS (And slightly OT): Is PvPGN an option? (IIRC it has a beta level
Westwood Online server, which should work over IP rather than IPX)

Gert

[Alexander Nicolaysen S...]

On Friday 28 November 2008 20:45:10 Gert van den Berg wrote:

Background:
Red Alert / Red Alert II / C&C / Tiberium Sun uses IPX for LAN play.
According to AppDB, this works, at least for Red Alert II (Orginal RA
is not on the first page of Google results...), but it requires Wine
to be run as root.

All the games work, but IPX requires root privileges, as you say. For Command
6 Conquer Gold/95 there is a modified version of the game's networking DLL
that uses TCP or UDP; this DLL works in Wine. You could try to use that DLL
for the other C&C games and see if it works. Please post your results here.

You can find the other AppDB entries on the 'Browse Apps' page and use its
search function.

Since I do not have IPX installed and I'm not normally in a mood to
recompile my kernel, and the Windows users that I want to play against
do want to install IPX, I downloaded a patched wsock32.dll from
http://www.understorm.net/ . According to the site, it lets the games
multiplayer run over UDP.

Without the patched DLL, RA2 does not enter the LAN screen, while with
the patch it actually enters it. I cannot see games though.

Now the question:
When setting the override for wsock32 in WineCfg, Wine warns that Bad
Things(TM) may happen. What happens if I override wsock32? Is it where
Wine interface with the native networking?

Is there any way to emulate IPX over IP on Linux? And will it talk
with the modified Winsock DLL?

Is there a possibility to (in the future) include (optional) IPX
emulation over IP? (I think Dosbox allow that, an it might be handy
under Vista / XP without IPX installed as well...)

If IPX is needed, is it possible to run it as a normal user? (Gentoo)

Note: My Red Alert comes from the Fisrt Decade bundle. (It has a few
patches from http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/cnc ... files.html
applied (none, except for the LAN patch for RA2 (which does not
overwrite any files) and I have normal Red Alert updated to 3.03 (with
wsock32.dll for 3.03))

PS (And slightly OT): Is PvPGN an option? (IIRC it has a beta level
Westwood Online server, which should work over IP rather than IPX)

Gert

I belive Westwood Online uses TCP/IP for communication.


Regards,

Alexander N. Sørnes

[Thunderbird]

Using posix file capabilties you can give wine only root permissions for creating raw sockets. A lot of distributions are doing something similar these days for ping which also required complete root permissions before.

[Gert van den Berg]

On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 10:59 PM, Alexander Nicolaysen Sørnes
<[email protected]> wrote:

All the games work, but IPX requires root privileges, as you say. For Command
6 Conquer Gold/95 there is a modified version of the game's networking DLL
that uses TCP or UDP; this DLL works in Wine. You could try to use that DLL
for the other C&C games and see if it works. Please post your results here.

I have that on my C&C 95. (No one wants to install it to test though...)

That DLL is only included in C&C and Red Alert. (And it seems that Red
Alert 3.03, which integrates a newer WestWood Online client into Red
Alert might not be using it anymore...(The IPX fix for Red Alert 3.03
is a wsock32.dll, not a thipx32.dll))

Thipx32.dll do not contain Microsoft version information, so it is
probably a Westwood DLL...

You can find the other AppDB entries on the 'Browse Apps' page and use its
search function.

I belive Westwood Online uses TCP/IP for communication.

Westwood online with a PvPGN 1.8.4 server (Linux version) seems to
work, at least sort of... (More a PvPGN limitation than a Wine
issue...) Setting it up takes a while to figure out (If anyone want to
try it, read the PvPGN forum, the documentation is non-existant...)

Gert

[Gert van den Berg]

On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 1:20 PM, Thunderbird <[email protected]> wrote:

Using posix file capabilties you can give wine only root permissions for creating raw sockets. A lot of distributions are doing something similar these days for ping which also required complete root permissions before.

Where can I find a guide to Posix capabilities? (Isn't that a FAQ yet?)

I would think that IPX should not require Raw sockets, but probably a
IPX socket (since it seem to be a supported protocol in the kernel)?
<rant>Why IPX requires root while IP doesn't, does not seem to make
sense... It seems to be just a nother socket type...
http://linux.die.net/man/2/socket </rant>

Gert

[Thunderbird]

When I worked on Wine's ipx code for Red Alert and friends posix file capabilities weren't around yet. I haven't used them yet. You can find info about it on http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/libra ... ixcap.html

I think that you need to set the property on wineserver.