Re: Dial-up modems (Re: FREE GAME: Spirit of the Mouse)

ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) looked up from reading the entrails of the porn
spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs say:

Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:
...

We had an acoustic coupler for awhile.  I think I could type faster than
it sent letters.

>

That's like 300 speed. ;)

>

Depends on how fast you can type :-)
300 baud is probably amazingly fast to hunt-n-peck typists.

>
I hunt and peck on smartphones since I have to have one hand hold it and while other hand type!
>
>

And in the 80s, before GUIs were common and everything -even a lot of
games - were character-based, 300 baud was probably usable, if a bit
slow. Although I can't imagine using anything that pokey for
downloading stuff; even 28,8kbps was tedious at those speeds (the
original Doom Shareware took me over an hour to get, back in the day).
Even looking at images was a chore; you'd queue up two or three and
that would be it for the night ;-)

>
Yeah, but you had those evil line noises!!!!!!!!!!!!

 
No, you didn't. Most modems supported the AT M0 command, which turned
off the speaker from the start. It was one of the first AT commands I
learned, and boy howdy did I make sure every AT string I used included
it! That squeal people associate with the dial-up era of the Internet?
 
I never heard it.
 

Then you were never properly IN the dial-up era of the Internet!!

>
Let's fix that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xalTFH5ht-k :)
It's funny to read the auto text (subtitle/closed captioning)s. :D
>
Speaking of action games, what games did you play over dial-up? For me,
Duke3D, DOOM, Heretic, BattleZone, MotoRacer, Diablo, Warcraft, Quake, etc.

Being mostly a single player guy, not many.

Descent a few times, DOOM co-op a couple of times.

Diablo - I would start a game in network multiplayer mode and play solo.
In the event I got a bad random level and got killed and could not
retrieve my stuff, I'd call up a friend and he'd join the game and help.
I did the same for him.

Limited multiplayer Mechwarior 3 - It was just head to head duels so it
wasn't much fun, although I have a fond memory of the aforementioned
friend picking a small fast mech for a duel and me taking a large one I
armed with Gauss Rifles and me blowing off half his mech with the first
salvo.

I think that's about it, although it's possible we did a duke3d
multiplayer at some point, and I think I might have done quake pvp once

Xocyll