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Originally Posted by GermansRGeniuses Actually, dial-up works well for the IL-2 series, even hosting!
What do you play? IL-2? FB? AEP? PF? |
Dialup should work fine for most online games assuming there are not too many players in the real time area simultanously.
For dialups to work well, you should make sure you have pleanty of RAM (512 mb seems to usually be enough), make sure all other web connections and unnecessary programs and background tasks are shut down, if you use a voice program such as TeamSpeak make sure the codecs are set low (I suggest under 10kbps), and set your swap file to a fixed minimum size (I suggest 1GB or more, depending on how big your drive is), leaving the max size unlimited (i.e. max size avail on your drive) or set to the same size as minimum (leaving it unlimited protects you against the unlikely possiblity that you might need more and have a system error, but also introduces the possiblity of fragmentation. It will never be over-run unless you run lots of large apps simultanously, and I've never known anyone to get an over-run on a 1GB swap file except when trying to get one for a test).
To set the swap file to a fixed size in XP, goto the control panel and select "System", goto the "Advanced" tab, hit the "settings" button in the Performance section, hit the "change" button in the Virtual memory section, select the drive you wish to change the swap file for (you can do this for all drives, but the C: drive is the important one), bullet the "Custom Size:" choice, and finally set the "Initial Size" to the size of your choice (I suggest at least 1GB), and either set the "Maximum Size" to equal the Initial Size or the max space on your drive.
On Win98 (from memory), you goto the system menu, select peformance settings, select advanced, select virtual memory settings, and do the same thing - but there is only one swap file location (leave it on C: unless you know what you are doing if the alternate drive should crash).
Then defrag your hard drive.
The reason to do this is because if you let Windows magage the Swap file (ie: virutal memory or paging file) it will constantly be allocating and de-allocating space as needed. This quickly fragments your drive and your swap file area, which then leads to stuttering in your games. This is more noticable on a dialup because it cannot "catch up" easily when there are delays in packet processing, but it can negatively effect gaming for even very fast connections.
Note: If you have only 512 mb of physical RAM or less, you should try to kill all unneeded tasks before playing a game. If you need me to post on this topic, please ask.
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