A deep technical dive into how id Software engineered Quake to run on both DOS and Windows 95 using a single executable. The article explains the DJGPP compiler's DPMI extender architecture, the challenges of cross-platform networking, and Mpath's "Chunnel" technology—a virtual device driver that bridged DOS socket calls to Windows 95's TCP/IP stack through interrupt marshalling. This allowed DOS Quake to access modern networking without requiring expensive third-party TSRs.
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