My need was seemingly simple: I set up an old ThinkPad 760XL (166 MHz Pentium MMX) running DOS for my son to play 1990s games on, especially but not exclusively Sierra and LucasArts adventures; for that purpose, the laptop is quite suitable, it has a decent ESS sound chip and a CD-ROM. Moving data to the laptop on a CF card with a PCMCIA adapter is not difficult, but it gets old; it would be really handy to have the laptop on the network, accessing the home NAS via either SMB or NFS.
The laptop is of course old enough that it has no built-in Ethernet or WiFi, although it has two PCMCIA/CardBus (at least I believe they’re also functional as CardBus) slots. But the laptop is portable, and it’s in a corner of the house where there’s no Ethernet socket nearby. So WiFi would be really great. But is it even possible to get a DOS laptop on a WiFi network in 2019?
The short answer is “yes, but”. The long answer follows.
That link points to part 1 – part 2 has also been published.
Setting up modern wireless networking on older devices or operating systems can be a major stumbling block – there’s not only hardware and its support to consider, but also things like encryption and support for modern wireless security standards.
Many of the devices in my Palm OS and PocketPC collection, for instance, have wireless support, but will often lack support for WPA2. Often, the only viable solution is to create a pretty much open guest network, which is not something I’m a big fan of.
I’m glad I’m not into MS-DOS like the author is, because I certainly wouldn’t want to tussle with this problem.
I really don’t know why the author did not consider access points clients that allow wired devices to connect to WIFI networks. I’ve used this in the past to connect my wired computers in an apartment that only had wifi. These were commonly used for PS/2 game consoles I think.
I haven’t used this product, but it’s a good example of what I’m talking about.
http://en.vonets.es/products/VAP11G-300/
So, no need to run old wep or unsecured wifi to get a remote dos laptop onto secure wifi.
As an aside, dos x86 emulators are pretty mature. Other than for bragging rights, he could probably go dumpster diving for a modern laptop with built in wifi and run all his old games just fine.
@Alfman, the author did state the device had no Ethernet either, so from the laptop perspective he’d still be solving the problem. Although I appreciate your option would leave him with more WiFi security if he could get a PCMCIA Ethernet adapter working instead of a WiFi adapter.
FWIW, I’d go emulator as well.
cpcf,
That’s what I meant, I had one or two laptops from that era with only PCMCIA ethernet. It might even still be around somewhere, anybody want it? I’ll throw in a serial mouse 🙂
Haha, sometimes it’s about the journey and not the destination.
A PCMCIA ethernet card and 100 feet of CAT6 cable would have been cheaper, faster, and more secure than what he did. I imagine that it was more the challenge that made him stick to WiFi than anything else.
JLF65,
Yeah, you and I prefer to run ethernet to our equipment, but I have little doubt a PCMCIA ethernet card plus WPA2 AP client would have been the easiest and probably cheapest option for the author if only he had thought of it (it runs for less than $20 on amazon). Alternatively he could have opted for a powerline networking set, but it’s less portable and costs more. Either way, totally transparent to DOS.
The bigger issue IMHO is just DOS itself. Many of those games will not run while the packet & network drivers are loaded because of 640k base memory inadequacies. But he can always reboot after transferring files just like back in the day, haha. 64k segments sucked for programmers and 640k base memory sucked for users. It was a patchwork of XMS, EMS, highmem and base memory with no single configuration simply working with all applications and drivers. I remember coming up with some pretty sophisticated autoexec.bat/config.sys boot menus to support everything. That’s one thing I’ll never miss about DOS.
32bit dos extenders like DPMI became available towards the tail end of DOS’s existence, DJGPP was awesome, no more memory limits! But by then DOS was already obsolete.
Yeah, all the EMS/XMS/highmen stuff was fun! Sort of. Our own DOS product used extended memory, so having to use a ton of drivers wasn’t an issue. Hell, our product required a bunch of drivers most others didn’t. And then we had to turn right around and get it working well in Windows 95/98 at the time. DOS extenders were the way to go at the time, but that time passed quickly as Windows advanced quickly.
My first laptop was a Thinkpad 760, so I am quite familar with many of the issues. It came with OS/2 (Warp) as the default, but it also bundled DOS and Windows 3.0 out of the box. Networking in all of these OS’s confused the heck out of me (what is NetBIOS? Netware?), so I never touched them. Bought a PC card style Ethernet card (not supported by OS/2), installed Linux, plain old TCP/IP, and it all worked.
As people here and elsewhere have noted, the best solution is to use a client access point device that connects a wired client to a wireless network. I use a D-Link 505, but there are zillions of others that work as well. But the author seemed to enjoy confronting the challenge of getting the 760 to “natively” support wireless. To each his own.
IDE emulation using NetPi
https://www.retrotronics.org/home-page/netpi-ide/
Yeah, the mistake is to use WiFi. I regularly surf the web from DOS, CP/M. etc. The key is:
1. If the device supports Ethernet – use Ethernet. You can either directly connect to the network, or use a Wifi Bridge to connect to the network. I also use a Raspberry Pi as a Bridge, connecting to the WiFi network via a direct Ethernet connection to the Pi.. If I am running DOS, I like to use FreeDOS and its excellent browser Links. It even support graphics and a mouse, but I tend to prefer Text Mode – much faster.
2. If there is no Ethernet support, use an RS-232 serial port connection, I often use a Pi Zero with a Serial Port HAT. Once you setup the serial port to accept console login, you login to it via the Oldie Goldie and use Links 2 web Browser.
NOTE: Whether in Links for DOS, or Links 2 for Linux, HTTPS support is present, so I can go to all kinds of sites. One of my favorites is lite.cnn.io.
Between these
Yes this ^ Came here to post exactly that . I’ve done it a few times works great.