🚀 go-pugleaf

I have been playing Doom over the network, locally only.  The game
works reasonably on an ISOLATED segment of ethernet.  I get the best
performance using 486DX2-50's Local Bus.   I've had trouble running
2 486DX2-50's and one 486DX-33.  The problem is the speed of the 33MHz
machine.  I run fine with three 486DX2-50's.  Very fun in Deathmatch
mode.  I suspect that people would have LOTS of trouble running outside
a LAN.  I even see a slight slowdown if the segment that doom is running
on is not isolated from the general LAN traffic.

I've found that Doom transmitts 488 byte packets at rates of about
30 kilo bytes per second (of actual data, this does not include the
header or tailer that the LAN coprocessor includes) and 52 packets
per second.  This is with general traffic on a LAN (DEC stations
mainly.)  Here is the raw data from Gobbler - 506260 bytes, 17 seconds,
1001 packets.  99% of the packets received were from Doom.  Doom was running
on 2 486DX2-50's with a 386DX25 running Gobbler.

Basically this implies to me that to play Doom outside a LAN one
needs a throuput of about 30k/s continuously.  -- and any bridge between
two players will (should) filter out broadcast packets.  It gets even more
complicated than that if ID releases a non-broadcasting version.
I have also found that the packets are mostly 0's.

                                  Andy.