Re: A Nostalgic Ramble: Online gaming services of yore

On Fri, 16 May 2025 12:48:02 +0100, Mr Rob
<noemailformethx@jsjsaiiowppw.com> wrote:

Gamespy was my favoured app for online gaming. I particularly remember
playing hundreds of hours of Codename Outbreak, both in co-op mode and
PVP. I even bought a hardware desktop dial-up 56K modem to 'reduce' my
ping down to around 200ms so that I wouldn't cause so much rubber
banding for my friends in the US.

Oh gosh, software modems! I'd forgotten about those!

(for those not in the know, these were very cheap modems were the
actual modulation/demodulation was actually done in software on the
main CPU rather than on dedicated chips on the modem. This brought the
cost of the modem down, but it meant that high CPU activity could have
a profound affect on your bandwidth (or, vice versa, using a lot of
bandwidth could max out your CPU).

I never actually used a software modem, that I recall. I owned a few
as 'add-in' cards from cheap PCs, but whenever I went online I used
'hardware' modems. So I never saw the effect of playing games with one
of these.

I also remember using WON for online games. I think I played Quake 2
via WON for a while.

WON! That was the one (heh) I was trying to remember. I remember that
it was originally created by Sierra, which made me think of INN, but I
knew that wasn't it. No, it was WON.

I don't recall if I used it, though.