Because I didn't wanted to open the cabinet each time for updating
MAME-roms or ArcadeOS,
I decided to connect the cabinet to a network, as I already
had two more network-cards lying around. Easy said, not easy
done...
- Problem:
- The cabinet-pc with ArcadeOS runs under pure (win98-)DOS.
Connecting it to a Win98-machine is not a standard issue.
- Solution:
- I found several pages
addressed to this. I tried everything they said, but nothing
worked for me. As an extra handicap, the cabinet-pc didn't
have a floppy-drive, meaning that I had to flip the floppy-cable
between two computers, each time I tried something new.
I have currently installed Win98 on the arcade-pc, just to make the
network-connection. This is an overkill-situation, more on this
later.
Network Running!
I managed to get the network up and running from the cabinet-pc.
I now can access the network out of the cabinet. However, I
can not access the cabinet-pc from any other pc in the network
due to limitations in the environment: networkwide drive-sharing
needs share.exe to be loaded, but using Win98DOS, this isn't
possible.
Later on I'll hack my copy of share.exe to get it loaded, thus
enabling network drive-sharing. Running old plain 6.22 DOS should
also resolve this problem, but DOS has a 2 Gb partition-limitation.
Maybe later on I'll decide to parition my HDD again, but for
now I'll live with it.
No drivesharing shouldn't be such a big problem, btw. I can
just plug in a keyboard and work on the arcademonitor, thus
requiring only 2 actions for network-access: connect network-cable
and keyboard.
I got it up and running using Microsoft Network Client 3.0,
available for free at ftp.microsoft.com
in the /bussys/clients/MSCLIENT/ directory. More info on this
can be found at J. Helmig
pages, remember to look for 'connecting to a NT4-server', other
solutions didn't work for me.
