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Comment by raesene9 | Hacker News Reader

Back when multi-player doom was a thing, as mentioned in the video it was IPX networking, so to play over the internet we had to tunnel IPX over TCP/IP, using a tool called kali.

Worked surprisingly well given the network speeds we had (28.8k modems)

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Kali! I haven’t heard that name in a long time. I used it to play many hours of Warcraft 2 and Command & Conquer with friends - what a great enabling technology for its day.

Descent and Descent 2 deathmatch were awesome on Kali back in the day.

Loved playing them deathmatch, the 3 dimensional aspect made them loads of fun!

Yeah there was something special there that I haven't seen happen in games ever since then. The full 6 degrees of freedom was disorienting at first but extremely fun once you got the hang of it.

Yeah the 6d was crazy to get used to. I sometimes wonder if that's why I had pretty good VR legs from the get go with the OG vive.

descent multiplayer was so good. I loved seeing ships chasing and shooting at each other all over the map. I don't think any other game quite captures that level of mayhem.

The levels were just wild too. Huge open areas that trick you into thinking you know how they work, and then oops you forgot what's above and below you as people swoop down and blast you mercilessly.

Descent gave me extreme anxiety when it was time to escape the level. Such a well constructed game.

Every level in Descent 2 was nonstop dread until you took out the damn thief bot!

I played so much Descent on the Kali ladder, and a buddy and I would play 1v1 Descent 2 basically every day after school. The mind games around camera dropping were such a cool mechanic.

It's a shame there's apparently no appetite for that sort of 6DOF game anymore. While the quality increase in graphics, etc, is dumbfounding I also feel games have silo into just a few formats/genres. In particular anything that strays out side of the WSAD paradigm seems doomed to be ignored.

Back when I was playing Descent one of the big tips was to set up key bindings that'd let you strafe in 3 dimensions at once. So instead of WSAD, I'd have Left/Right on Q/A, Forward/Back on W/S, Up/Down on E/D and Roll on R/F. This was a big advantage over the default layout, but was probably too weird for people to try and get used to.

Yeah a flight joystick with a HAT control for sliding/strafing and throttle lever actually worked well in my experience. I'm sure keyboard and mouse would ultimately be faster, but it was fun feeling like you were a fighter pilot with lasers.

I used a joystick as well. The big advantage is I could control all 6DOF simultaneously without moving my fingers. Players who couldn't do that were definitely at a disadvantage when things got really chaotic as the automatic roll feature didn't work particularly well. You could do a 6D circle strafe vs them and tuck into a blind spot where they couldn't get back on aim to you without adjusting roll with a little pause/hitch in their movement.

I used the hat to switch weapons and such.

My friend used roughly the same idea with a trackball, which was probably even better.

Had my kali code hand written on a sheet of paper. Had it for 20+ years before I lost it .

I did it with IPX over parallel ... the cable went out the window over to the next dorm room!

My friend’s dad was an HP engineer and had a lot of gear at home, and I think about 5 PCs in various rooms. They were networked with BNC Token Ring. FWIW I still have never met a more sane or satisfying plug mechanism.

His was a Mormon/LDS family so Doom was off the table, but I sure did log a lot of hours playing Star Wars: Dark Forces 2 and Tie Fighter. Good times.

Before that it was the Wacky Wheels on 486 over 14.4, and before that BBS’s.

Around the same time, my city had this free TTY phone IVR interactive fiction. You could dial some like 622, then enter 5 to play a sci-fi RPG over voice, with 0-9 as inputs. There were community features on that as well- it was one of those microcosm Municipal Computing, and much like the Santa Monica City early digital community I there there is a fascinating history of these short-lived, micro-networks and digital spaces that popped up in the 90’s.

Almost all of my digital entertainment in childhood needed a phone line, which were quite expensive and my parents made sure I knew that.

http://www.mckeown.net/PENaddress.html Santa Monica’s system was called PEN. It seems like a microcosm of the last 25 years of the web compressed into a couple of years in a small beach town, on the edge of everything.

I remember IPX over parallel... Actually I don't. I have no idea how we got it working back then in almost pre-internet times.

I buried coax through my backyard to the friend’s house who lived behind me. Ran it under both houses and up through the floors in our rooms. I wonder if the next people to live in my house ever figured out what that extra coax was for…

Wanted to play multiplayer Doom with a friend once. We lugged my PC and monitor to his house and discovered that he had a 25-pin serial port and I only had a cable for 9-pin. Fortunately he had a box of adapters and we were able to make a “cable” completely out of adapters. We stacked up books and junk under our computers until our the serial ports were at the same height then carefully pushed them together, back-to-back, with the adapters sandwiched between.

I spent a lot of time packing my parents computer into my front passenger seat to haul it to a friend's house to play Doom - with a 30 foot cable so we could be in different rooms!

Before Kali, in the mid-late 90’s, we had had a 4-node dial-in BBS in my area code (813) called The Arena that ran an app called SerIPX - basically IPX over serial - to allow 4 players to play Doom. It was an incredible experience at the time, especially when paired with Dwango5.wad and other 4-player centric maps. Worked great on a 28.8k modem, direct, with no TCP/IP.

So many memories, but I wish I remembered more from that era. Crazy to think it was a quarter of a century ago.

Kali was great, I also remember using ten.net on duke nukem 3D release was a blast. Especially with the “K” trick to see other people screens remotely!

> Worked surprisingly well given the network speeds we had (28.8k modems)

Poor bandwidth, but good latency.

Could also do halo 1 on console via kali

I remember playing Diablo over IPX over a phone line with my neighbor in the dorms which was especially silly because it was 2005.

This reminded me of my first networked gameplay: Super Maze Wars (1993)

I believe it ran over AppleTalk. Anyone knowledgeable on the difference between Kali and AppleTalk? I played a fair bit of Diablo over Kali. (Ears, anyone?)

Yeah, Kali! Best $20 i ever spent. Hard to believe that we used to play Warcraft 2 4vs4 in the late 90s. Somebody always disconnected before the game was over, but still!

You can still do IPX/SPX through zerotier

I remember running an IPX/TCP gateway from Novell it work flawalessley

Why wasn't the networking in doom just done as TCP/ip (or UDP/IP)?

Doom was from the early 90's. The internet wasn't a common thing, so TCP/IP was not as thoroughly established then as it is now.

In the early 90s IPX/SPX was more common for LANs than the IP stack. It required much less configuration. Managing IP addresses in the days before DHCP was a hassle, while IPX just used MAC addresses directly. It also was just a simpler protocol. This was in the days of DOS where the driver had to run as a TSR the lower 640KiB memory area, so the driver size mattered.

In the later 90s IP pushed it out, partly due to Novel Netware fading away, and partly because IPX didn't scale to large networks the way IP can.

Great response, thank you :)

Googled tsr, terminate and stay resident if anyone else is reading this.

One other question, if a dos game used TCP/ip, would the developer have to write their own ip stack? Presumably dos didn't provide any of this?

Yeah, IP wasn't batteries included in the OS until later. I believe there were a variety of library venders but honestly don't know for certain.

Thanks

Fun fact about doom IPX is 1.0 absolutely spammed the heck out of the network finding peers. Most colleges had big problems days after its release because doom was DDOSing the network. They quickly patched it but patching wasn’t as easy as it is now.

Funny, that's actually how Jay Cotton (co-creator of Kali) learned about Doom and what led him to start exploring the network side of gaming.

There's a decent interview with him that relays the story: https://episodiccontentmag.com/2016/08/26/kali1/

that comment brings smile to my face and tears to my eyes :)))

Because "internet" barely existed at the time doom got out. People played multiplayer games mostly in the same physical room.

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