Thanks, at least that saves me the trouble of installing alternatives that definitely won't work.
Looking at the networking methods in VirtualBox, it does seem that there is at least the possibility that Dolphin could be changed to no longer need a TAP driver to support the BBA if Dolphin had a NAT mode:
If Dolphin could behave similarly by encasing the BBA behind a virtual router, then a TAP adapter wouldn't be needed anymore. The LAN games would probably need port forwarding to work, but since there aren't that many of them, it would probably be practical to just automatically forward the ports that they need to connect.
I guess the good news is that VirtualBox is GPLv2, and thus it might be possible to use some of its methodologies in Dolphin if anybody were willing to port the code. If my C skills weren't so rudimentary, I'd try to do it myself.
Looking at the networking methods in VirtualBox, it does seem that there is at least the possibility that Dolphin could be changed to no longer need a TAP driver to support the BBA if Dolphin had a NAT mode:
VirtualBox manual Wrote:The network frames sent out by the guest operating system are received by VirtualBox's NAT engine, which extracts the TCP/IP data and resends it using the host operating system. To an application on the host, or to another computer on the same network as the host, it looks like the data was sent by the VirtualBox application on the host, using an IP address belonging to the host. VirtualBox listens for replies to the packages sent, and repacks and resends them to the guest machine on its private network.
If Dolphin could behave similarly by encasing the BBA behind a virtual router, then a TAP adapter wouldn't be needed anymore. The LAN games would probably need port forwarding to work, but since there aren't that many of them, it would probably be practical to just automatically forward the ports that they need to connect.
I guess the good news is that VirtualBox is GPLv2, and thus it might be possible to use some of its methodologies in Dolphin if anybody were willing to port the code. If my C skills weren't so rudimentary, I'd try to do it myself.