Quake was the only game to support DOS and Win95 with TCP/IP multiplayer in one executable—deep dive explains how id Software did it
The mid-90s was arguably the period in PC history with the most whiplash-inducing changes. The arrival of 3D acceleration cards, the transition from plain-textbox DOS to fancy Windows 95, and the advent of the Internet all . This rapidly shifting landscape posed quite the challenge for game developers, as they had to consider writing their games for DOS, Windows 95, or both.
In an exceedingly detailed writeup, Fabien Sanglard explains how the OG Quake got its support for TCP/IP and was arguably the only game that used the same executable with native support for both operating systems.
Quake had native TCP/IP support coded in, yes, but since it was cross-platform, it needed a way to interact with Windows 95’s Winsock TCP/IP layer. Additionally, in-game match/server browsers were a new concept at the time, so id killed two grunts with one rocket by enlisting the help of Mpath Interactive and integrating its Mplayer match-making software into Quake.
Mplayer’s software comprised two pieces: a “Gizmo” game browser that would autodetect any Mplayer-compatible games you had installed and list game rooms for them, and a solution called the “Chunnel”, the component that would actually talk to Windows’ TCP/IP stack.
To round out cross-compatibility, Quake also shipped with Mpath’s genvxd.dll. This is a virtual device driver that translated DOS networking functionality (that itself uses the now-standard BSD socket function calls) to Windows 95’s Winsock. Once that was fitted in, the journey was finally complete, and Quake would run seamlessly in both DOS or Windows, without needing separate installers or executables.
For the nitty-gritty technical details, be sure to visit Fabien Sanglard’s deep dive. If this conversation got you raring to play the original game again, go ahead and get the remastered version.
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