[Wine] Red Alert / Red Alert II / Tiberium Sun: Overriding wsock32.dll to avoid IPX

[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/cncstuff/0_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