README

ipxbox
======

Copyright (c) 2014 Vitaly Sinilin <vs@kp4.ru>

Published under the terms of the MIT License.

ipxbox is a userspace tool that allows user to connect a vanilla
DOSBox to real IPX hosts available in the L2 network. Surprisingly
DOSBox cannot do that on its own. Although there is a Native IPX
patch [1,2] available on the Internet, it is not really convenient to
use it since for some reason it still has not been included into
the DOSBox upstream.

How it works
============

For DOSBox ipxbox looks just like another instance of DOSBox running
on the same host. But instead of using a convention described in
rfc1234 [3] ipxbox assigns its client (real DOSBox) with an IPX
address based on the MAC address of the interface connected to L2
IPX network (not on client's IP address).

Once a client is registered ipxbox starts decapsulating and forwarding
incoming IPX over UDP packets from the client to the L2 network via
a packet socket and encapsulating to UDP and forwarding to the client
incoming broadcast and unicast bare IPX packets.

ipxbox listens to UDP port of the ipx service (213).

Usage
=====

Since a privileged port and a packet socket is used ipxbox needs to
be run as superuser (beware of backdoors!):

    sudo ./ipxbox eth0

An IPX client in DOSBox needs to be started as per [4]:

    ipxnet connect 127.0.0.1

Links
=====

[1] http://home.arcor.de/h-a-l-9000/dbdl.html
[2] http://ykhwong.x-y.net
[3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1234
[4] http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Ipxnet