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

[Alexander Nicolaysen Sørnes]

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/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


I belive Westwood Online uses TCP/IP for communication.


Regards,

Alexander N. Sørnes