I didn't mean to imply that, just that the only reason q2 gets as much love these days is that it's source is available.

And iD did a great job of writing modular and portable code.

It was really exhilarating to get it running on a different platform with essentially no real changes, other than platform code and initially removing the DLL support.

Thankfully DJGPP had progressed far enough that its DLL support works great.

I remember there was a DOS extender that could run Win32 console and very basic (full-screen window) GUI binaries. Just enough to run Quake 2 in software mode.

HX Dos extender.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/hx-dos/

when the author disappeared from the face of the earth I uploaded everything I had regarding it. It's an incredible extender, sure, but it's nothing like having a native port.