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

On Sat, 12 Oct 2024 20:13:39 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, 12 Oct 2024 02:17:50 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

Speaking of action games, what games did you play over dial-up? For me,
Duke3D, DOOM, Heretic, BattleZone, MotoRacer, Diablo, Warcraft, Quake, etc.

If you mean direct connect (as opposed to dial-up Internet), then
pretty much Doom. I think we tried Falcon 3.0 (or some flight sim?)
and Wing Commander Armada, and a few others here and there (thinking
back, I remember Witchhaven briefly entertained us) but mainly I
remember playing a lot of Doom.

Nah, that's like direct serial connection. I remember parallel cable
could be used for DOOM back in 1994! It actually worked, but slow. I
tried to find it but https://archive.org/details/cdrom_201511 is
temporarily down. :(.
>

Well, only in the sense that the modem connected to the serial port. 

    [Oh boy, those were the days when you had to know the IRQ
     and port assignments for your serial ports. I am NOT unhappy
     that little bit of trivia has escaped my brain]

You could do a direct connect between two computers via serial (either
by a null-modem cable or parallel if you were hacky) but modems meant
you didn't have to be in the same room. It did limit you to just two
players... but then so did serial connects.

It being the early days of multiplayer, my friends and I shared a
couple of walkie-talkie radios (as we lived in nearby apartments) that
had _just_ enough range to allow us voice communications. ;-)