Wow you played begin too! I added multiplayer through DOSbox--

it was interesting that the AI craft were just like player craft but had a different controller. It was possible to splice in keyboard input for that. Then I wrote some screen scraping software to send the commands remotely.

Here's the software project http://begin2.sourceforge.net/

Unfortunately the sourceforge matchmaking server has long gone offline, but you could connect direct to IP addresses too, so it should still be playable