Retro Game Pc Build focused on Tribes
Greetings nerds!
This is a story about pc gaming, game pc builds of yesteryear, building a retro pc game box today, and etc that might be of interest to you nerds... I mean geeks... I mean T2 players. You might want to get a snack and something to drink, this will take a while. Also pleas keep in mind I'm doing this from memory and thus mistaken on a lot of points.
When I first started building pcs (1998) there was a fair amount of pc parts to be found locally, especially of the oem/surplus variety as the hq of Gateway was only a hundred miles away from Omaha, where I lived at the time. When a pc oem is nearby, you might rationally expect the local area to be flooded with refurbs, seconds, and etc from that oem as just about anything the oem doesn't feel like storing it sells off. About once a month there was a huge pc fleamarket in the Sioux City area filled with Gateway surplus as Gateway was just across the border in South Dakota. Coincident with Gateway moving production and hence surplus around the country and even to Ireland, we had no place to get pc parts cheap like in the heyday of the Gateway surplus craze. We, the local pc building community, suffered pc fleamarket withdrawls. That is, until a pc fleamarket opened at the Omaha Nebraska National Guard armory - and you could find great deals there, from familiar "vendors" who previously had loads of Gateway surplus to private party local sellers both, sometimes even some random Gateway surplus. At the time, the slot cpu sockets were common and it was easy to find just about any core you wanted, from slot-1 Pii 233s up to 1ghz slot-A Athlons, and for much (and I can't emphasise this enough - much much much) cheaper than in the local pc retailers brick and mortar shops. Take for example a pc consisting of a Athlon 800 Slot A cpu, say 512 sdram, dvdrom, and a 20gb hdd as found at a local unnamed brick and mortar pc shop for around $800 or more. I noticed the same overpriced pcs sat in the same shop for weeks and months at a time, you figure the owner would eventually drop prices but no. With identical spec Gateway surplus parts from a fleamarket you could roll more or less the same pc for maybe $200 at most. I know a guys gatta make a living, but rape is rape no matter if you're in Omaha or Moscow where the police are stern but fair.
The amount of surplus was astounding at first, the vendors had literal pallets of mobos, cpus, cd/dvd roms, hdds, mem, etc, all from Gateway. Most of these surplus parts were returns to the oem for some fault or other reason such as quality control discoveries or merely obsolete, but many were perfectly serviceable.
It was common for the fleamarket vendors to "warranty" the part - if it was doa or failed they'd replace it next month at the next fleamarket or refund your money. I picked up a few Jabil - Kadoka mobos (Athlon Slot A Gateway OEM boards) dirt cheap, built a few pcs and gave a cpu and board to Rusty, my Tribes buddy/nephew. How about 2 mobos for a measly $25? A cdrom for $10? How about a pallet of Voodoo 3s? Or perhaps a pallet full of Aureal pci sound cards? One trick I recall from then was if you found a tiny colored paper triangle sticker on a Gateway surplus part, look at the point of the triangle, the circuit trace or part there might be severed/scraped or otherwise damaged. You looked over every part before you laid down your cash and walked away from that fleamarket table with your "new" part. Eventually the pc surplus dried up as Gateway lost sales, moved to Ireland, and got bought out, consequently the fleamarket in Sioux City stopped being worth the drive as parts dried up and prices rose.
How does any of this crap relate to Tribes?
Prior to all this happy surplus pc parts fleamarket stuff, Rusty, bless his little heart, got me into the pc game Tribes; he and Gizmo mercillessly spawnkilling me over and over till I learned to instantly press the w button after spawning and move the mouse to get out of his/their blaster spam.
WSAD uber alles, arrow key users be damned!
Didn't even know how to move or shoot, how pathetic.
Before that I'd never pc gamed before, well there was that Atari 800XL or whatever it was that had missile command, miner 2049er, and pole position in high school, but I digress as that was much more akin to console play than current day pc gaming.
Thru the magic of being simultaneously pissed off and exasperated by something taking place on a pc screen... I became hooked on game boutique Dynamix's loveingly hand crafted goodness... in a masochistic way.
It became an almost daily ritual to meet at the coffee shop after work and use their pcs - all had Tribes as well as other games - mostly demos, and spend an hour or two fragging away. I learned how to ski, use the jetpack, place turrets, etc to the point I was no longer dying within a few seconds of spawning.
It's also perfectly normal to kill everyone in Hitman Codename 47, drag their bodies into an intersection, and then stand in triumph atop the pyramid of dead.
Speaking of Tribes...
Rusty had provided me with the full game and updates on a cd he had burned at home from a legit copy of Tribes. We found out later the reason Sierra went with WON.net to authenticate Tribes 2 purchasers for online play was Dynamix/Sierra found there were more people playing Tribes than had purchased the game, something on the order of several times as many. Apparently Rusty and I weren't the only players sharing a legit disk.
Oops.
Anyway, when Rusticles and I were walking thru a mall in Omaha one fine day we stopped at the game shop. They had a single copy of Tribes, new in box, $14. Of course I bought it, and bought several copies of T2 later on when it came along. Perhaps some old vets recall emailing Sierra with pics of your T2 cd case with code so they would unlock your T2 game from forgotten pw or somesuch - this obviously from the time user authentication was still being performed.
From what I understand, Tribes 2 was originally to be a free update to Tribes, but Sierra said nope, new game, you gatta pay to play, so we did. When you think about how there were more people playing T1 than had bought the game you can't really blame them for going with authorisation.
Happymod came along subsequent to Tribes release. Hm spoofed memory locations the game would use in legit fashion - filling the fake locations with forbidden content the legit game denied to players - and then directed the game to use the fake mem locations. This relatively amazing hack for Tribes showed you where every player in the game was at all times even thru walls or terrain, and every emplaced turret. Happymod, or hm as it's called, had more or less ruined ultra mod play in Tribes because in ultra it is common to shoot across a map.
For ecample, one time in an aerial fight (ultra has unlimited flying and even boost) I had to lead the guy off screen as he was so far away, meaning he was off the screen to one side or the other for me to get him, guesstimating where he was going to be with my string of bullets. Hm also made the base players bitch even tho it had far less an effect on gameplay for base nerds than ultra nerds. Base weapons could hardly go 300m, some ultra weapons shoot across the map.
So what did the devs do for T2 in spite of hm? They included perma iffs for the flags - with happymod in Tribes 1 the flags were 50 feet tall and could be seen across a map! Normally in Tribes there was no flag iff at all, if someone stole your flag you had no idear where he was unless he was in your view. Also there was one guy, "da jackal", that was literally hard coded into the Tribes game by Dynamix so he would be kick/ban from any server, lol, he must have been a real pain as the Tribes devs are great guys. I also heard they tried to or did hire HapPy to work on Tribes 2.
Following on his success in HM, HapPy rolled out HM2 for Tribes 2. This one did the same thing for T2 that HM did for T1, but added a new twist, an aimbot. Aimbots for T1 exist but only a few people have them, specifically L Spyro and nofix, each coding their own.
I had in-game recordings of Spyro and nofix running their aimbots in an ultra and base match respectively, it was fun to watch the realisation sink in on the players being slaughtered. And the accusations. Lol. It was always fun to obs nofix in matches as he was otherwise a good player. L Spyro only seemed interested in games to see if he could hack them, not play them.
Remember the first time you fired up T2? Today the image quality of T2 and especially T1 are laughable compared to pc games made in the last 15 years, but they were decent for their time. The owner of the coffee shop had preordered T2 and had Rusticles and I install and set it up when it showed up. We were amazed at the image quality improvement over Tribes, and T2 had water! If you ever saw water in Tribes you'd understand why we were so blown away with a puddle of water in T2.
And Derms. T1 did not have derms so that was new. And yes as mentioned by many the game was filled with glitches, it even had slightly different models and/or textures than those common to T2 today, but to say we were enthusiastic is an understatement. Also the master server lists for both T1 and T2 were filled with servers that were in turn maxed out in player count then. If you ever played at places like Houston or Miami Vehicles in T2 or any Homelan Federation Shifter mod server in T1 you know what I mean. Today T2 has like 20 servers and 20 players on a good nite mostly playing classic, T1 might have 40 servers and 30 players and the majority will be rpg mod players.
Prior to wasting time at the coffee shop with Rusticles and the game pcs, my only exposure to pcs was the lowly Cyrix 586 rig at home, it ran 95 and then 98 when it came along. Most of the pcs at the cafe were of the pii 350 to 400mhz class, all running 98 - this being 1998 era.
Before the Cyrix I had some dos running laptop type systems used for HAM radio but nothing major or expensive. Never gamed on any of them, just used for office type work and seeing what all it could do. Then after being exposed to Tribes, the urge to build a more powerful pc for home use hit. I wanted a pc at home that'd game at least as well as the ones at the cafe. All the people I played Tribes with had innernets at home cept for me, plus they all had pcs that would play Tribes.
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I didn't know much about game pc parts selection when starting out; what specific part was available that'd be worthy of "gaming", so I set about studying like mad, reading any and all pc mags and books I could get my hands on. To be fair, I have been into electronics since I was 13 (a very long time ago) and was accustomed to creating circuits and soldering discrete components like diodes, transistors, caps, etc. I knew how pcs worked for the most part, just not what parts were currently best for specific purposes like gaming. At that time it was common to have two video cards in a "game" pc, one did 2d, the other was a 3d accelerator, and a jumper cable was used to go between the two. Vid cards were pricey even then so you had the additional cost for a 3d accelerator. The next evolution in video tech would be to perform 2d and 3d in the same card, the tnt, rage, and i740 were efforts in that direction.
At home Crusty had an AMD K6 system with 3dFx voodoo cards in sli, I had no idea whatsoever about any of that other than it sounded cool and made the games run faster, but Rusty was adamant that it was uber and leet and all that. One of the neat deals about voodoo cards is they speak glide, the api Tribes was actually written in; opengl was an afterthought by the devs as not everyone had cards that spoke glide. We set Tribes to use glide in voodoo sli mode and were blown away, glide looked so much better and played smoother than the typical opengl rendering it was like night and day. Glide simply looked nicer than opengl, even with antialiasing enabled in opengl. Then add an Aureal sound card to get the sound effects in Tribes and you had a pc pretty much tailor made to play Tribes. There were other games written in glide, Quake comes to mind, but we didn't care much about them. Apparently a lot of other people didn't care about glide either, because soon glide was forgotten by game devs and pc gamers alike. 3dFx seemed to want game devs to use glide as their api rather than d3d or opengl, but opengl won that round. Today it seems most aaa games use d3d and the unreal engine, a shame far as I am concerned. I mean, T3 (Tribes Vengeance) had hacks written for it before it was released, due the ut engine. Same for T4 (Tribes Ascend).
As I recall glide was what some arcade games used, 3dFx was in the arcade biz before they made pc vid cards. Eventually when 3dFx had made a few bad biz calls like buying up other failing vid card companies... their debts were over their profits, the sharks smelled blood in the water, and a shark named nvidia bought them out and hired some of their engineers, wich is why nvidia offers sli now.
3dFx has an almost cultlike following today, and even has driver developers. Kinda like creative sound cards, with their various 3rd party driver packs.
There used to be a number of vid card makers, SIS, Tseng Labs, Matrox, ATi, 3dFx, Power VR, come to mind. Several of them were bought out by the big 3 either to get their intellectual property, put them out of biz, or both.
Look at this list and see if you had any of these blasts from the past;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_d ... _companies
Today we have roughly 3 video card chip makers; AMD, Nvidia, and Intel.
Pretty much AMD (who gobbled up ATi) and nvid sell their chips to "partners" who use reference pc board designs from the respective chip makers to make cards and sell them, Intel goes about it themselves. Back in the day Intel bought out Real3d, who made vr setups for military and science. Intel used the Real3d tech to build their i740 agp cards, said i740 cards were no match - fps wise - for nvid or others in the same price point, and that was all for Intel in the grafix market till today when you can buy discrete Intel graphics cards in a new laptop or desktop machine. Last time Intel tried to enter the discrete video card market; the Larrabee project, they used masses of p54c cores on the same die, the original pentium core, just hundreds of them on the same vid card.
One of the pc mags that helped particularly with sorting what parts would be good for a game build was Maximum PC, the mag also came with a cd that had apps and game demos. Max pc reviewed dozens of complete rigs and discrete parts per year and always had interesting articles. More or less what I learned about game pc building was to look at what the boutique game pc builders were offering and then emulate the same systems - but on cheaper mobos and vid cards. For example, instead of top of the line Asus mobo, get a MSI or Gigglebit, or, dare I say it, Biostar nForce mobo. Asus was my fav for anything pc related till ECS bought them out, haven't touched one since but I've heard their quality is ok. Instead of a Elsa or Gainward Gf3ti500, get an EVGA or PNY version. The thing about building this way is the boutiqes sorted out what parts were compatible, reliable, and powerful enough to be competetive (and you didn't have to spend a dime) as they had direct access to the parts makers and even the os writers. These parts makers wanted to sell parts so they worked closely with the boutiques - something you and I mere mortals couldn't do. You may recall the likes of Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Cyberpower, and several lesser known boutiques making headlines in the early to mid 2000s, open any old max pc mag and look in the back pages for a trip down gaming pc boutique memory lane. A lot of the boutiques are gone now, however Alien was bought out by an oem and still exists as a oem line you can get from some of the big box stores.
As mentioned before, a Linux users group, or LUG, started having a monthly pc fleamarket in Omaha area locations, settling in the NG armory. The place was always packed and you would always find some seller not wanting to cart something home with them so were willing to deal. Ebay, so you know, has not always existed, so we needed fleamarkets.
Then after 9/11 the armory shows stopped due to the obvious, I mean the NG had a guy in camo with face paint, a guard dog, and full mag in his M4 telling people that pulled into the parking lot the fleamarket was cancelled for the time being, never came back for all I know. A little inconvenience felt in Omaha unlike what had happened in NYC.
Then a place called DIT came along, DIT was a brick and mortar shop that had several locations in Omaha and they sold new pc parts about as cheap as you could find anywhere. The local brick and mortar ripoff places that had been in Omaha since people started buying pcs were still charging arms and legs - and DIT bit deeply into their biz right in their own back yard. The good old days like at the fleamarkets was back! DIT often had a bare bones special consisting of cpu, mem, and mobo for an insane price. Sometimes they had entire systems for dirt cheap, but the case and psu were often really cheap units. I asked a guy how DIT got so low prices on new gear, I knew he had been their webmaster for a while. He laughed and said the parts were seconds or refurbs in many cases, and the sign on the table filled with oem nvid Gf2 cards sometimes bore this out by saying part was not returnable - you rolls the dice and you takes your chances. He also mentioned the owner having family in Asia in the tech manufacturing sector that helped him get killer deals. DIT expanded into Iowa and maybe other states, giving up on the cheapest parts in town motif and went full msrp pricing like worst buy and the rest of the big store pc parts retailers long before they faded away - DIT went out of biz I think around 2015 or so.
One time me and Rusty walk into DIT (in the good old days) and they had brand new AMD XP cpus (XP cpus had just hit the market and I was rocking an Athlon 750 slot at the time so was looking to upgrade) and a literal pallet/bin of M$ Windows XP oem install discs, I got a AMD Athlon XP1400 cpu, a mobo, a copy of XP for myself, and a copy for Rusticles as he is a worthy nephew. It was less than $100 for a XP disc and can't recall how much they wanted for the XP1400 cpu but it was cheap. Got a Biostar or MSI mobo with Via chipset and some ddr to go with it. Off I went for a state of the art build with all brand new parts. XP the OS hadn't even been released to market yet and here we were driving back to small town Nebraska with a few copies lol. Before that we had been running 98, Millenium Edition (wich I preferred over 98), or 2k.
The mobo I got to go with the XP cpu had a VIA KT-266 chipset, these chipsets were problematic and VIA soon released a updated set, the KT-266A, and it was an excellent set with none of the probs the earlier release had and with very good performance. The next big problem was what vid card to run with this state of the art cpu, mobo, and os? I mustered on with a TNT2 or Rage128 for a long time as no sweet deals on vid cards came my way, these vid cards were holding me back from all the performance my cpu and mobo could allow. Eventually a nvid gf256 came my way, but it was a mere step above a tnt2 or rage card.
Most everyone playing Tribes at the time had dialup. It was ubiquitous, broadband was just entering markets in larger metros but it was seemingly ages getting to Blair Nebraska. Oh sure you could get ISDN but that was a mere step above dialup. So I decided to start using dialup. The dialup I got, being only 5 blocks from the phone co central office and hence its bank of modem cards, provided a best of 44kbps on a good day. Sometimes I could get 56k, like at 4am or so when no one else was using dialup. Often I couldn't synch my modem with the phone co at all but the phone line worked, so I called the isp tech number and the guy at the desk said "I told them we needed to buy more modems!" This was my lesson in a neat trick used by ISPs called oversubscription.
Oversubscription is where a ISP sells more innernet access than they can rationally expect to provide bandwidth for. They know not every person in town is going to be using dialup at any one time - so they don't have to buy enough modems (or bandwidth from the ISPs ISP) for all their subscribers! it works fine for them for the most part till some nerd like me can't get a dialup synch at 10pm because every modem card in the rack at the phone co is in use. Yes, they had a rack of pci slots with pci modems being fed from local phone lines, that hence fed into whatever broadband link the ISP had to innerweb. Sadly, oversubscription is here to stay as a common business model, your ISP likely practices it too.
Anyway, people on innernets suggested I try to find a hardware modem to get best results from dialup, so I went looking. All I had at the time was a winmodem run by the cpu, and always unreliable. At first I got a external USR comm port hardware modem and it worked like a champ, synched faster too. You remember USR, U.S. Robotics? They made the killer robot in Will Smiffs epic movie "I Robot" as you may recall. I ran that modem with tweaked comm port settings and it certainly helped with modem drops, speed fluctuations, and etc. Then at one of the Omaha flea markets or DIT I found a pci hardware modem. This would allow one to bypass the comm port stack entirely and dump packets right into or out of the pci bus. Kinda a poor mans dsl. Noticeably lower latency than the external comms port modem, just as reliable, and also made by USR!
I used to hang at pc mechanic forums and they had a section for members to sell used parts, Wolfie sold me a socket 462 Nforce mobo for the XP cpu I had. The nforce was all the rage at that time with dual channel mem and very high quality onboard sound. In benchmarking with the same cpu and mem, nforce was superior to the KT266A VIA chips in most ways - but not by much, I was then running a 266A mobo. Still I was only playing with a lowly TNT2 or gf2 card, getting my butt handed to me by players with many more fpseses, or at least I imagined it was my hardware that sucked and not me.
Wolfie later sold me a Gf3ti card he wasn't using anymore, and it made a world of difference in gaming as the nforce mobo and gf3 card were meant to be together.
So now with gf3ti card on a nforce mobo, I had a xbox pc more or less.
The first xbox, of a similar era to my first nforce system, is more or less a celeron 733, a gf3ti, and an nforce mobo/embedded system running a nt/d3d based os. The xbox gamed fine for its time so I knew I was ok with my setup at least for a while. But a console, even in pc clothing, simply cannot satisfy a member of the Elite PC Gaming Master Race. That's a thing, the Elite PC Gaming Master Race.
If you play Tribes you are a de facto member of said race. And likely its most elite niche of nerds, people who actually play Tribes. There's what, maybe 100 of us worldwide in T1 and T2?
But wait.
Did someone mention game servers?
Could swear someone said game server.
I definitely heard game server.
Let me tell you about them.
Gizmo, one of the nerds who got me into Tribes, ran a Tribes server whenever he was working as he could use the work pc and bandwidth at the ISP to host online players. He hosted a "listen server", one where the player hosts a "server" in the same instance as his game "client" plays the game, but I understood none of this technobable at the time. Little did I know that whenever I was forced to play Tribes with Gizmo and Rusty I was actually inside Gizmos pc, as was any of the other players in that match. Kinda like the movie Tron but not really. Rusty, my nefarious nephew, had mentioned this "server" thingy to me before - that we could run our own, but it didn't register with me, after all, at the time I was still unsure if I liked Tribes or not.
After learning a game server was the persistent world environment the players interact in, I was all like what is this "server" thingy you speak of? Gizmo further explained it to me and I was like hmmm I'd like to run a server thingy someday. Crusticles was all for it. A few weeks later it just so happened Rusticles and I amassed a pile of older pc parts, yes, from a fleamarket, and we started putting a "game server" together that would be "colocated" at the ISP and stay up full time. The ISP folks were nice letting us park our server on their bandwidth as they played Tribes too. In France they call servers "waiters" like as if they worked at a cafe or something. In canada, milk comes in bags.
Anyway.... I think our first Tribes server was an old Slot 1 Intel mobo running a 266mHz pii cpu with a blazing fast 66mhz bus, mebbe 96mb (64mb and 32mb sticks) sdram, all tucked into a gigantor beige server case that was mostly filled with air. You remember those, they could hold like 14 drives? It was a huge tower case I got cheap somewhere and we popped in the board, a 3com nic, psu, a tiny ide drive, a fresh coat of 98.... and off we went to game server host land.
Yes, 98.
On the ISPs line.
Rusty's Playhouse!
This server is how we found out 192.168.1.1 could end up as an actual globally visible ip, lol.
Eventually we added a firewall.
It ran Tribes dedicated server and nothing else. At the outset we ran the various flavors of renegades mod and settled on ultra. The server was so popular at the time that often we couldn't even get into our own server till we upped the player count to 30 or more. It was packed almost 24/7 for days at a stretch and yes we had no idea what we were doing but whatever it was we were doing it was fun.
This was in 1999/2000/2001, think we had a game server up almost 24/7 till 2007 or so.
After The Blair Witch Project movie came out, invoking the name of our home town, we renamed the server Blair Lag Project, each version of Tribes we served used that name. The cs1.6 server was named Foreign Intervention 1.6.
I often watched, as geeks/nerds are wont to do, the game console and task manager in the server to see how it (the server) played; the only time there was really any cpu use by the game - even if there was 30 plus nerds logged in at max packet rates all trying to kill each other - was at map changes, and that was mostly due to disk access overhead as the next map was loaded off the disk and into ram.
Part of the map-change-cpu-spike issue was texture verification of each client, conducted so everyone was allegedly playing the same game, this would take cpu cycles as well as more than normal net bandwidth in and out till the map was loaded and textures verified. The map changes never got above say 60 percent cpu but I still wondered if I could reduce it and/or speed up map changes at the server.
So how does Tribes Dedicated Server work?
https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/tribes ... -model.pdf
I was, at that time of our foray into game serving, reading up on servers in general - and there was little to nothing on the innernets about building one, best practices, etc. Most servers in the world are _not_ serving games, they're serving webpages, cat videos, and databases, and have little in relation to game servers as far as software/app served goes, so you know.
FPS Game servers are pretty much about one thing; a consistent low latency response to player input.
Most every other kind of server can have loads of latency and still perform its function well, not so with a game server where consistently low latency is paramount. There are ways to improve game server latency such as running at higher priority, dedicating a cpu core or cores to the game, and tuning the netstack for lowest latency for udp packets, but these were way beyond my skillset in 2000.
In FPS gaming, fps here standing for first person shooter, a combat simulation, latency is all.
In fps game pcs, fps is all, and here fps means frames per second, the more fps the lower the what, kids?
That's right kids, latency!
FPS is life.
"If you were running this on a Falcon Northwest PC you'd be done by now" (actual Falcon NW ad in a 3dmark benchmark)
The higher the fps simply the less latency between player input and results on screen. From the Tribes Networking White Paper we learn that Tribes Dedicated Server, all flavours, sends at maximum an update packet every 32ms. However, the server will show if one types (showfps); into the server console 100fps as the result, or a loop/frame every 10ms, but only the gamestate recorded by the server prior to the next gamestate packet to be sent is authoritative.
I presume input packets from clients are absorbed into the server at that rate - 100fps or every 10ms the server will accept input packets in whatever order they hit the server netstack from the wan/lan.
Clients, on the other hand, are hard limited by the game to send only up to 30 packets per second to a server, or every 32ms. So, say there's 30 nerds sending 30 packets per second to a server with that server sending 30 packets per second back to each client, well, thats a lot of packets to be processed. So there's some relevant numbers on the subject of Tribes latency to ponder. Needless to say we started using an Intel pci nic as the 3coms were more cpu intensive and the realtecs not very latency or cpu friendly either.
I started thinking mebbe the disk system could use an upgrade as the disk in the server was some old quantum bigfoot ide (Integrated Drive Electronics) drive or other quaintly named pc part. So we went looking for "scsi" gear at the next few fleamarkets, as suggested by my study in the art of serverage. You say the word "scsi" as "scuzzy", not as "sexy", but to a nerd scsi is indeed sexy. Very sexy. It's also very old and obsolete tech today.
As luck would have it, we soon scored an Adaptec 2940UW scsi card, some scsi cable, and a few tiny (4 and 9gb) scsi drives. Scsi stands for Small Computer System Interface, a "bus" via wich one could attach drives, printers, all sorts of doodads, and it was all uber geeky and nerdy, reducing cpu time as it handled its own error correction and detection, offloading all the boring drive access stuff from the cpu. Plus most of the ide drives we had at the time ran at a lazy 5400rpm and the cpu handled all the ide interactions, the scsi drives typically screamed along at 10krpm, that and the scsi adapter card made the map changes much less noticeable to the cpu. Scsi has needs all its own - such as setting addresses for each device on a scsi chain including the 'dapter card, ensuring the scsi cable end was terminated, preferably actively, and etc geek/nerd terminology.
We had arrived in game server nirvana via a scsi bus. Lol, dapter.
And oh the fun of assembling a drive case filled with multiple scsi drives and a psu, then forgetting to leave an address for the hba. The hba is normally 7 by the way and I'd set a drive in the middle of the case to 7, good job, and to get it out and change it I had to undo all the 20 feet of scsi cable and termination.
And plug it all back in again.
An oddity noted while hosting Tribes;
We had a regular player, "ben laggin" by name, who seemed to posess mythical Tribes abilities.
1337 5k1llz.
He was, more or less, unstoppable. When the same player routinely gets several times the normal score of non-cheating veteran players, well, that might indicate something is "wrong".
So one day when ben was putting on a fine performance in our server, we decided to perform a test. When the next map loaded, we put ben on a team by himself and everyone else in the server, 25 mostly vet players, on the other. We did this without telling anyone first - several players naturally tried to switch onto bens team but we stopped them and asked them to humor us for the next map and then all would be revealed.
Ben complained about the teams, I assume he suspected what was going on, but we said play the game.
The match began.... and those 25 players?
They never laid a hand on ben, he killed them all and stole their flag over and over again, capping it till the map was over. A T1 ultra map might take 16 caps to win and lasts 25 mins, this one didn't last near that long. At first the other players went easy on him since they didn't think us badmins putting poor ben on a team by hisself was in any sense fair, but after they noticed he killed their entire team they started actually trying. If ben died it was his own doing, not the other players. If he was smart he would've let himself get wacked every once in a while thus defeating our challenge, but his ego apparently demanded otherwise.
He was online from somewhere in the US playing against others with similar average pings, say 40 to 100ms, however the players at the cafe all had a huge advantage from being on the lan to the server; pings of 16ms, and he still killed them.
Never saw anything like it before or since.
This was Tribes 1 ultraVX mod, bloodbath the map, and there are about 28 people who witnessed it. I watched the console at the server the whole time after the map started and noted nothing unusual save for bens kills and caps.
That was enough for me, ben had some serious code on his side that we knew nothing about. He was a nice guy, but we all knew he was cheating his ass off.
Back then I'd no idea how he was pulling this off save for some secret dev insider hack, today I'm thinking he may have been using timescale and hm plus some exploits rampant in Tribes that at the time I knew nothing about. One time when we were just starting to notice ben was special, I filled a room ben and his team was in with mortars, killing everyone save for him. I asked him how he survived it and he said "learn to play the game". Sure. Then I heard in some cases Tribes had probs with registering hits on players in corners of rooms, for example. Never worked for me when I tested it. There was also a Tribes exploit where you could lay a mine on a roof or floor of a building and then fire mortar rounds thru the mine to the floor below. Neat! The mine didn't explode. Eventually that got patched out. It was fun while it lasted tho. You could pop force fields in T1 if you spammed them with mortars till they popped, or used full laser charges on them. That lead to some seriously angry players wondering wtf was going on as our force fields wouldn't let them thru while theirs let us in.
The map change cpu time was now so low I wanted to do some further testing, how low could we go cpu-wise and still smoothly host 30 or more psychopaths trying to kill each other and steal each others flags at max packet rates? So we popped in the slowest pii cpu we had, something like 233mhz, we had several pii slot cpus - relics from the ISP on hand, up to 450s, but we reserved those for low end game client builds, not server hosting. At the time, a common game pc found in the average home might be a pii 450 with a nvid tnt2, ati rage, or a voodoo card, a lot of guys had the AMD K6 cpus too. Turns out, Tribes dedicated server runs absolutely fine on a pii 233mhz cpu.
Got a copy of 2k so we used that as the server os, and it ran fine with much less hassle from crashes and outright hackability than it had under 98.
98 was never meant to be left running for days on end anyway - a must for just about any kind of server - unlike 2k wich could go for months easily.
That said, you never want to run Tribes Dedicated Server without a restart every day or so to clean out mem leaks and such or to not run out of strings.
Later on we ran a dual 1ghz piii server just because we had the parts, and it served not only Tribes, but Tribes 2, CS 1.6, and Tribes Vengeance all at the same time. Of course it had scsi drives. That dual piii system worked a treat till one of the cpus failed. Then we rolled a dual Athlon XP1400 setup (Athlons would do smp, who knew?) on an Asus A7M266D mobo hosting the same games. In our Athlon SMP server was a Intel pcix offloading network card, a pcix scsi card, some scsi drives, and a few gigs of ecc ram. All very servery.
For the time, the Athlon XP chips had outstanding floating point processing power compared to many other cpus, even faster (mhz wise) ones, and many fps games are all about floating point math so running float heavy game servers on cpus with superior float is a no brainer. This server didn't even notice map changes or full servers.
That server still exists today, hasn't served much of anything for years, but look for it in the future.
Anyway I think I mentioned retro game pc build earlier.
but first some addenda that got lost in translation or something and I quote;
On the T2 box it gives some examples of desired and minimally acceptable pc system specs for gameplay, the gf3ti was the target card for an optimal spec system.
T2 is more or less a DX6/7 class game (as is T1) with some DX8 shader bolt ons such as the reflections on surfaces, chutes in buildings, and on armor; effects that will not show up in cards that don't have shaders.
The games I played at this time were Tribes, Tribes 2, Mechwarrior 4, CS 1.6, and Q3, that was about all I was interested in, but did have a plethora of game demos such as hitman 47, Kingpin, FAKK2, MDK2, Aliens, etc. Did you guys know Dynamix made Mechwarrior? I didn't till just recently, always figured it was just a M$ buyout of the game dev fasa ip, but nope it was Dynamix who started it. You know, the very same Dynamix what made Starseige, Starseige:Tribes, and Tribes 2? Dynamix got bought out by Sierra, who, oddly enough, had an office in Omaha at the time. I shoulda visited their office to ask when they were going to finish T2. Then Sierra fired everyone in Dynamix and closed them up. Then some of the guys what were in Dynamix started Garage Games and hand crafted the last official update to T2, and the Tribes ip changed hands a few times since. Last I know, hirez, who I think tried to make a browser version of Tribes and did make Tribes Ascend, still owns it.
As time went on my once state of the art XP1400, nforce1 mobo, and gf3ti system fell further and further behind the state of the art. The parts were dated even before I got them as they were well used. Everybody else had cool new hardware! I was languishing in the doldrums of pc parts obsolescence and knew it, felt it, tasted it, but the cash on hand to change things was then, as ever, wanting.
Anyway Wolfie then traded me a ATi 9700 for my lowly ATi 9500 (he said there was a rumor that the 9500 was better at WoW - wich he was then addicted to - than the 9700, I think he was just helping me out) and I eventually scraped enough cash to get a new mobo and cpu, DIT once again provided a great deal on a cpu and mobo for my new state of the art build. For the price of the cpu alone at other places, I got a P4 Northwood core running at 3ghz, and a gigglebyte mobo with Intel 865 chipset and already had the ATi 9700 for video. Needless to say, after assembly and a fresh coat of XP os, this was by far the fastest pc I'd ever used. This was also the timeframe when IBM had the fastest and yet most unreliable ide hdds, it was a love/hate relationship till I got over IBM and a data corruption forced os reinstall every other week. IBM Deathstar instead of Deskstar lol. Good times. That said, this pc was so fast I finally got more than 45fps in fight scenes in T2! Yay!
T2 was and is still today demanding on a video card. Specifically the vast terrain that can be in view at any time, add to that any number of players in camera all moving and shooting, add some vehicles and you can see why legacy video cards like a gf3ti or ati9700 can stumble. I ran a trinitron 21in crt back then at 1024x768 resolution with a refresh rate of 100Hz. I expected any game I had to run at 100fps at all times, well, T2 definitely challenged that expectation. The 9700 played Tribes at 100fps easily, I think I saw a peak of 1400fps with vsynch off, but in T2, with a fight scene going on with multiple players, well, 45fps was still a typical minimum for that system. I wanted 100fps at all times under any circumstances in T2, not just Tribes. The vid cards of the day were not up to the task, and I admit perhaps I expected too much from them.
Regarding the Pentium IV Northwood CPU....
I once had a dream of becoming proprietor of a game pc boutique along the lines of Alien, Falcon NW, Cyberpower, etc. This dream was popped when I got a flyer in the mail one day, not so much a flyer as a reality check. Dell or whoever it was would sell me a complete pc; os, mon, etc for what DIT would charge me for a single 3GHz P4 cpu, even with volume discount if I bought more than one. No competing with truly high volume sales like the oem guys dished up on a regular basis to cut each others throat. I could do a retro game pc boutique tho, that'd be killer. You send me your old pc gear, I clean it up, build it, slap an os on, tune it, and send it back to ya. But why would you pay someone else to do something you can do yourself and enjoy doing it?
Needless to say I've been building and repairing pcs for a while now, even down to the component level. Bad caps on a stick of ram or mobo? Not a problem!
It was, in my early retirement days, nothing for me to install an os, do some tests and note the results, zero write the drive, and then install another or tweaked the same os, looking for some performance improvement however slight it may be, several times in a day, just for fun.
Try an os with apic, no apic, try it with acpi, no acpi, etc.
Yes, apic and acpi are two distinct pc os hals, not typos,
HAL means Hardware Abstraction Layer, the code between the os kernel and your hardware, a very important piece of code. One os with many hals can support a lot of very different hardware.
Each tweak had its tradeoffs and I learned that the automated os install defaults usually were right on the money as to reliability, useability, and performance.
However if you wanted to sacrifice everything for reduced latency you could select no acpi and no apic at time of os install and live with the heat and irq contention it caused, but the reduced latency was glorious in fps games.
One time I tried ducting the front case fan output to the top of the cpu cooler fan via automotive heat riser ducting, more or less a flexible thin walled aluminum pipe, in essence force feeding the hsf. Hsf means heat sink fan unit, the cooler thingy atop your cpu.
That XP 1400 cpu ran at room temp pretty much full time thereafter and you could barely hear the fans, unlike before the added ductwork. I reported my finding to pc mech forum and people had doubts, to wich I replied try it and see. Anyway when I was testing out a new and faster Athlon cpu in the same pc I mismanaged the hsf clips and the cpu fried as it wasn't in precise contact with the hsf - experimentation can be costly. DIT was kind enough to give me a new one, no questions asked, however AMD engineers wanted to ask me a few questions about the cpu I fried, so I called them.
I mentioned the pc specs and how that cpu ran hotter than I liked no matter what I did, always using the factory supplied hsf (and not mentioning the heat riser tube mod), and the engineers, two of them on the phone with me, asked what psu I was using. I said a 300 watter. They replied the system shouldn't even be able to boot with that psu, lol. They explained the system is taking so much current from the psu the psu is maxed out, and the cpu is doing all it can to perform math while starved by the insufficient power system. Later I swapped in a better and higher wattage psu and the temps normalised. Today I stress that the single most important part in a pc build is the psu. Word.
There was also then talk in various forums about having a dedicated swap file partition on each drive, and I did that religiously until a guy who wrote windows drivers for a living clued me in on how bad that practice was. Do not use partitions, use folders as that is what they're for. Reason being is the high cost of the os transitioning from one partition to another, much more costly in interrupts and/or ring level changes than simple folders. You can prove this to yourself if you want to by testing.
Pagefile Zen; You want the pagefile to be right in the middle of the most often used, typically the os code, and in one piece, not fragmented.
The above does not apply to ssd disks, you want to avoid writing to and reading from them as much as possible, do not defrag them or checkdisk them unless you absolutely must. They have a life cycle for each cell and it can be maxed out sooner rather than later. They're better than they were but I still don't use them.
I recall a love/hate relationship with several pc cases. One was the Enlight 7237, a classic beige affair wich seemed to have extra sharp edges inside the case to collect dna samples I suppose. Still have the case, great case by the way but it will cut you. Another was the Antec 1040B case, what a wonderfull case! Got one with Enermax psu already installed on sale, had a locking front cover to keep tiny fingers out, and enough fans to easily hold a sheet of paper to the front panel. Hard to find a case with better airflow.
https://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/1q99/enlight7237.html
https://www.brian1.net/computers/enlight/
(lol he even mentiones the sharp edges)
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/antec-1040b-full-tower-case-500w-ps-abit-at7-motherboard-19--413838653240941933/
https://www.newegg.com/black-antec-performance-ii-soho-file-server/p/N82E16811129120
I miss the Antec case... it was given to Crusticles whose kids tore off that lovely locking front panel cover, but I do have it's son, the Antec SX635, pretty much a shorter 1040B with no lockable front cover. Just about the same airflow and just as nice to work with however.
http://www.tweak3d.net/reviews/antec/sx635/
A few years and moves from all that happy building and experimentation and I was running a Nforce2 system with a Athlon 4200 dual core (New Egg had a insane sale on the cpus so I bit and got a mobo used) and a ATi 850, when that vid card died I went with 6800gtx's in sli as the mobo spoke sli. Then 7800gtx's in sli when the 6800gtx's failed. Then a 7900gtx, a phenominal and likely nvids fastest vector rendering card, but oh it was so unreliable! Forums had lengthy threads devoted to dying 7900s.
Then a ATi 1950 came my way. Prob with ATi as far as Tribes goes is they weren't all that reliable in game, my guess is driver issues. ATi is famed for d3d gaming, not so much opengl. Neither my 850 nor 1950 played any version of Tribes reliably, even Tribes Vengeance wich is a d3d title was hard to keep running for a whole match. Maybe running a Ati card on an nvid mobo casued too much friction.
After running that setup - the networking onboard the nforce2 mobos was freaking insane (when it worked and didn't corrupt data - wich it did and there are also lengthy forum threads devoted to this) and was worthy of uber/1337 game pc status and I enjoyed it tremendously. One day the nforce2 sys just stopped responding to the power switch. All the other parts worked, just not the mobo, and the Socket 939 cpu I had was abandoned by AMD and the mobo makers as they quickly went on to other sockets, to add insult to injury! Still have the cpu.
My criterion for selecting video cards was and is along these lines; wait for nvid to make a card that would bench at least twice the score of whatever card I had at the time before I bit on a new one. After I ran a gtx8800, my first scalar rendering card, there was no going back to a 7800 even in sli. Next up was a gtx260 wich was about twice the card the 8800 was, then the gtx1060 wich is about twice the card the 260 was. The benchmarks I've used over the years are the 3dmark series for video, pt test wich does a great job testing an entire pc, not just the video, and some others that focused on drive performance.
By that time (rip nforce2 mobo) I had learned about Frys, a pc parts place that was about the size of a super walmart but filled with geek/nerd stuff, and there was one only 100 miles from home. I kept an eye on the weekly mobo combo deals in the Frys ads and found a Core2duo E8500 cpu and Intel DG35EC mobo for a bit more than I could get the cpu alone elsewhere!
Shades of DIT! ! !
This setup was paired with several different nvid gtx cards since 2008 when it was built, up to the current GTX1060 running right now as I type this, and here we are today postulating a retro game build with that same E8500 cpu. But not the gtx 1060, that thing has issues with opengl texture shimmer, and I presume mipmapping, in T2 and T1 both. Texture crawling/shimmer seems to be a nvid trademark. I noted a bit of it in the older nvid cards but nothing like with the gtx1060, it's horrid and distracting.
So as you may recall I promised a Game Server and a Retro game System build both oh mebbe a year ago. Well, so far I've only gotten around to the Game Server build as of today.
As to parts, I didn't want to spend a cent on a game server because I have been carrying this crap; mobo, cpus, scsi cards, drives, cables with termination, etc around a few different states and moves and wanted to put them to use.
The build started out very rocky as when I gathered the previously used parts I noted bad caps on the mobo. My dearly beloved Asus A7M266D Dual AMD Athlon XP board showed signs of leaking/bulged caps on the board, these caps were 3300uf at 6.3 volts, filtering the power bus on the mobo and very important to system reliability. I considered using used caps from another similar board I had on hand, but a friend who has amazingzon prime got me some new caps for real cheap with a temp rating of 105c just as specified. We collaborated putting them in because trying to suck solder out of plated thru holes with a 35watt iron is a pain for two people without a soldering station.
I mean I got the old caps out fine by myself but knew puting the new ones in would require good vision and hands steadier than mine.
We got the caps in after a trip to the local Chinese buffet place, have to pay for his help somehow right? Got the board home and put into the illustrious Enlight 7237 PC case where they belonged and began connecting the drive cables and psu.
Get you a Enlight 7237 case today!
https://www.mnpctech.com/collections/retro-vintage-gaming-computer-parts/products/enlight-en-7237-vintage-beige-atx-mid-tower-computer-no-returns
Man this vintage pc crap is going way too high these days! Speaking of server cases this one is similar to the monstrosity we ran as the first T1 server we built;
https://www.mnpctech.com/collections/retro-vintage-gaming-computer-parts/products/1998-inwin-q500-vintage-beige-atx-case-used-no-returns
If you spoke near the front of the case when the front panel was off it literally echoed, it was that big and sound reflective. Good times lol. Back in the day you couldn't give these stinkin things away and now look at em! I note mobos for the older cpus also are up, paid like $130 for the Asus board and XP procs back around 2006 or so when they were only a few years old.
I went looking on utube for stuff on the Asus mobo used in the server and saw this one;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O29rX2OiXzg
He has fun fixing shipping damage but gets it to run just fine with a bit of effort. The tall black caps near each cpu socket are the ones that were bad in mine but now they should be good for the next 20 years or so.
My current server has 2 XP1700 cpus of the non "MP" variety, meaning they aren't garanteed to work in SMP by AMD, but people used them all the time in dual Athlon boards due the price diff. MP cpus cost a good deal more than run of the mill XP cpus then as today, yet performed no better. In my board you can bypass the "MP" check so it will run with dual Athlons or even Durons, Durons being the AMD version of the celeron cpu brand. There is a bios available that allows one to run AMD Athlon M chips, these m procs were for laptops and consumed a great ldeal less power, even better is they had more cache than the Palomino core Athlons in the server right now. That said, with respect towards cpu power and game server hosting, I see around 8 to 12 percent cpu time in use with CS1.6, T1, T2, and T3 (Tribes Vengeance) servers running. A Q3 Arena server is also going to be added to the mix.
Now a few weeks ago after I got the board installed in the case and was actually trying to get the thing running I was having nothing but trouble getting everything to talk to each other without fatal errors. No less than 2 scsi drives flaked out on me - this is what I get for messing around with old parts, a fancy dual channel scsi card flaked, and a never ending deal with running 4gb of ECC ram.
I had long thought the A7M266D would allow for 4gb ram, but no, careful reading of the user manual showed a max of 3.5gb ram, registered ECC ram at that. RTFM! Reason why I spec ECC ram for my servers is due a white paper on bit errors in pc ram I read from some university back a few years ago. It said flipped bits in pc mem happened way more often than people assumed, the longer a system was up the more likely for bits to flip, almost all of it was due to random cosmic radiation. ECC ram is designed so that it can detect and correct errors on the fly. ECC DDR ram, however, might be a good deal slower than non-ECC ddr ram of its time, but I don't care as long as it can detect and correct bit errors. I tackled that bit flipping issue with the ECC inherent to the scsi adapter, drives, and the ECC ram. Some cpus also do ecc on cache memory, kinda like having ecc ram but not really.
On running 4gb ram making the A7M266D puke, well, anything above 3.5gb ram gets mapped strictly to pci addressing in this case and I had constant trouble with system failures till I gave in, read the fing manual, and noted a max of 3.5gb ram. Needless to say she's been up running for days now with 3gb ECC and no issues in event viewer noted by the OS other than asshats trying to hack. Before I settled on a mem config that didn't have issues I tried several versions of Server 2003 and finally settled on a Server 2003 R2 SP2 build with all updates. I coulda used SP Pro as OS or even Windows 2000 Pro or Server, but I know Server 2003 well and it uses a per processor runqueue, meaning it sets an app on a cpu core and tries its best to leave it there and not shift it to another core. Shifting an app to another core involves a lot of cache thrashing. All M$ os before Server 2003 just ran whatever app needs running on any core that becomes available, regardless if it has to erase the cache of one core to fill it with the contents of the other. I tried IDE drives too after enough evil scsi shenanigans, but going over 3.5gb ram caused eventual data corruption just like with the scsi setup, so back to scsi but with a single channel scsi adapter instead of the fancy dual channel gizmo.
A Word On Virtual Machines vs Literal Machines;
I know most game server hosts are using vms and for good reason, but there will always be latency and microstutter issues with vms as far as I'm concerned. FPS games are very sensitive to both issues so I want to host on a literal machine not a virtual machine, vm being a fancy term for emulation far as I'm concerned.
In the begining I had many problems setting up the server for deployment.
For example, I had the os and games installed and everything ran geat!
Shut down the server to remove the PATA IDE cd drive since it has no need for it as a server....... and presto, first run without the cd rom and right back to data corruption-land as the pci mapping had changed due to no longer having anything attached to the IDE bus.
No bootloader found!
It took me a long time to note the data corruption came with ram changes or removing IDE drives.
I first wondered if the mem was bad or incompatible as 2 sticks matched, the others were orphans. With 4 sticks installed memtest would error out at test 7. Then I tried memtest86 on each stick individually and they all passed! On top of that one channel of the fancy scsi card was constantly flaking out in device manager. Needless to say I was ready to pitch it all in the dumpster but something said in the back of me head hey you got another scsi card, try that and read the mobo manual regarding mem capacity. Apparently the fancy scsi card was sadly dying but the ram worked fine if I used only 3gb of it. The benefit from losing the fancy scsi card is that now the pci-x bus slots are only occupied by the pci-x Intel server nic. This nic offloads the packet processing from the cpu and has other tweaks of benefit to a server and has a good deal more system bandwidth due being a pci-x part rather than simple pci. The pci scsi card while single channel, it benchmarks the same as the fancy one did when it was running well as far as burst and sustained reads and writes.
Best part is it will drive burst over 300mb for such old obsolete junk and the latency is very low, the benchmarks were superior to the PATA IDE drives I tried.
So.... the above server has been running for days on end with only code updates to the games hosted without issue, needless to say I am pleased, however... I noted when viewing the consoles of all the servers when Tribes Vengeance was loading a map that the fps counter on the console of the CS1.6 server dropped to oh around 20fps or so. This means that whoever was in that CS1.6 server (and presumably all of the servers when the Tribes Vengeance server loaded a map) would experience some serious lag caused by the server itself, after more inspaection I noted up to 50 percent cpu use at map changes for T2 and Tribes Vengeance. I had always thought my little server would handle the hosting load put upon it with ease, but now I knew the awful truth.
So, ignoring my previous mantra of not spending another freaking dime on this shit I went looking for a less-than-state-of-the-art server of at least Core 2 Quad power complete with SAS drives (SAS has replaced scsi in the server world) and etc and found one not too far away on fb marketplace. It was a Dell R610 and after comparing it to ebay pricing with all the bits included by the seller it was indeed a deal so I went and got it. It has more than enough power to host the games I want. It's more or less enterprise class serverage but it is dated; far from the bleeding edge of server tech today, and that is to my benefit as it was cheap, what with cheap being my middle name.
Anyway after I got it home and put an os on it and started testing it, on a whim I went looking at cpu upgrades for it, especially ones with lower wattage. Wouldn't you know Intel made a 4 core 8 thread 40watt Xeon cpu in the same socket and ebay has them for $5 shipped! Good luck getting an Athlon MP2800 for $5.
Anyway I got some of these wonder cpus and popped one into the Dell and it took right off. I decided I need a home server for anime and HAM radio crap so the Dell is going to be the home server and code test mule for games, and I'll build another server to host games on. For now the beloved Dual Athlon server will continue in operation until its more powerful and likely less power hungry brother is ready to assume duty.
The brother server just mentioned is a dual Socket 479 Low Voltage Xeon system; ecc ram, scsi or sata drives, and a fancy server nic all dolled up in a 2U case. The procs in this system are rated at 30watts each running full bore and are more or less the processing power of a Core 2 Duo but with ecc ram capability, with two of them running in the server the load on each from games being hosted will be negligible and it should run very cool to boot.
Prob is I blew up the mobo for that system years ago and an identical replacement is not cheap for something so old and outdated, I mean I got the Dell R610 complete with drives and ecc mem for freaking half what the guy wants for the old low voltage Xeon mobo. However, a Supermicro board with the same dual socket Xeons, Supermicro being my fave mobo maker, can be had cheaply enough on ebay so rather than let all that servery ram and low voltage cpus go to waste will grab a board and put a decent server together, one that will hopefully last a few years.
So I think the server end is sorted, now to that game pc build.
I love it when people put old tech like PCs and old consoles to good use, even if it's not as efficient as getting something more modern. Just taking the tech that already exists, maybe fixing it if it needs that, is just a cool thing to me. I'm not as tech-savvy as you, but it was interesting to read that last post of you trying to make your server work properly with multiple hassles in-between. I sometimes watch YouTube channels like LGR, This Does Not Compute, Modern Vintage Gamer, Michael MJD, Action Retro, Tech Tangents, and that post reminds me of that, but in a text format. Hell, maybe you could even gain a few thousand subscribers on YT yourself if you'd do some properly narrated and edited videos of you fixing and setting up retro hardware.
Well, I wish I knew how to solder and fix broken down components myself. I know it's not that hard to learn now thanks to so many YouTube tutorials. I also have an old rig I received that I want to revive someday. It has an AMD sempron 3000+, 1GB RAM DDR, a 250 GB HDD, and an Nvidia Geforce 6200. It runs GTA San Andreas at the lowest settings and resolution, at about maybe 30 FPS, lol. Though because of the motherboard (did memtest already, tried 2 PSUs, fresh thermal paste, etc.) the PC restarts after about 10-30 minutes (random). The caps are not inflated, they seem normal. At this point, unless I know or care enough (I don't) about how to fix the MB myself, it's apparently cheaper to just buy a more recent and complete DDR3 kit (mb, cpu, gpu, cooler). And I could still put that retro case to use. I don't know whether to trash the motherboard or try and sell it, since it's so old and mysteriously broken.
Anyway, those case prices you listed are something else. They look very nice, they're retro, but I can find entire (weak, of course) PCs for that price on my marketplace sites here. Is it something specific about those cases that makes them expensive or desirable, instead of some random cheaper ones (with parts inside as well)? Also, that's true about the eternal deal on ECC ram. It's so cheap compared to normal ram, at least for the old stuff, don't know about the newer parts.
From your experience, do you really experience latency problems hosting servers from VMs? Shouldn't it be not such a big deal for older games on newer machines these days, hosting servers on VMs? Not that I suggest dumping your older machines, I also love retro hardware, but just curious. Oh, and UT 2004 is also a good one to host on weaker machines.
Thanks for the reply Roboto. On the vms, one should consider most vms are hosting dozens, maybe even hundreds of servers at the same time, this alone might cause latency to players in a match hosted on said cluster that would go unnoticed by the rest of the users who aren't playing an fps. Perhaps some vms are strictly hosting game servers and are low latency, perhaps not.
At issue is the games that aren't particularly latency-sensitive could likely be well hosted on a vm and the players would never notice a difference, here I am thinking of mmorpg games and the like. On the fps genre latency is all, and I doubt a cluster hosting everything from blogs to cat vids to maple story gives a shite about latency. Hence my mantra of fps belongs on hardware.
And yes it's fun to play with the old hardware. On your system that seems to be flaking there are usually two things I look at to see where the problem lies;
Check psu voltages in bios, moving around in the tenth of a volt area may indicate a flaking psu.
Run memtest, any memtest will do, and that can tell you if the ram, board, and cpu is ok.
On top of that look at cpu temps under windows, if it's high at idle, I consider anything above say 36c high, it'll be worse under load and if not checked may cause a crash and possibly data corruption. Try all the parts on another system if you can as that can tell you a lot.
I got another cheap 40w xeon, Supermicro board, drives, and ecc ram to put in the 2u server case, all that's needed is a decent low profile hsf and there should be no further lag at map changes.
Here's a cpu comparison of the current server to the one being built;
:D
https://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/233/AMD_Athlon_XP_1700+_(1.6V)_vs_Intel_Xeon_E5630.html
The "enterprise" class dell server I previously ran was replaced by a home build recently with good results so far. I had some ecc ram and some low voltage xeons and found a mobo to suit them cheap enough. Installed them in a old 2u server case and added some laptop sata drives to continue with the low power theme. The cpus are just dual cores without HT, I was hoping this would result in decent performance without the issues HT can cause in a game server as games are more or less unaware of the limitations of HT, and the OS may not be much better. HT cores are not a replacement for a full core, they might be considered vestigial in nature and in some cases only increase compute power a few percent, oftentimes an app runs less well with HT enabled.
This is the board I used;
The vendor doesn't show anything on the board in the ad but my mobo was shipped to me with installed low voltage xeons with hsf units and even some ecc ram. I was good to go. Hopefully the only money spent to play t2 from now on will be the monthly ac bill.
Anyway the new server with only "real" cores has resolved an issue I attributed to too many cores/HT cores in the dell; on flag events the game seemed to freeze for a few frames and then continue. Any flag contact such as a grab. drop, or return might trigger the behaviour. This may have been an issue with the/a statskeeping thread but who knows. The new server doesn't have this issue, runs smooth at all times for the most part even with the cores a few hundred MHz slower than the old server and of an much older architecture. Basically the new server is a pair of 2GHz intel c2d's compared to a 8 core 2.6GHz i7 with HT in the case of the dell.
The new server runs about 4 percent cpu load with T1, T2, and Tribes Vengeance servers up and better yet can hardly be heard, the 5 fans are very quiet. The dell server was very quiet compared to a lot of enterprise stuff but still annoying. This server should draw far less power than the dell, and the power saving script as detailed here;
Runs just fine once once set to the static bot count for even less power draw.
There's something to be said about Enterprise level hardware. When all my other boards die or flake out, the Dell R610 keeps on going. It may be a bit louder than the rest of the servers I've built lately nut you can mitigate that by setting the power plan in bios to minimum fan, max mem performance and it's as quiet as it's going to get. Otherwise you get this at startup, something that freaked me out when I first got it thinking I'd have to put it out on the porch to live with it lol;
It's nowhere near as loud after it boots and settles down into the os, actually you might not hear it from the next room. I mean you can certainly build for 99999 reliability, but it may be cheaper to just buy a few generations older enterprise rig and run it, admitting to yourself some oems have gotten where they are because they make good stuff that lasts. Speaking of 99999 reliability of enterprise hardware, I have multiple scsi drives that are from the early 2000s and they work fine, I don't have any pata ide drives from back then that still work, the diff between enterprise and consumer hardware quality of construction and materials, don't you know.
Today is the day. I said a few years ago in this thread we will be doing a dedicated T2 box with XP-era appropriate parts, well today is the day. My current game pc has stopped loading T2 past the player screen and is having sound issues elsewhere, the board's from 2010 so it may be on its way out. Now is the time. Not that all my parts aren't busted but sold as used working before I even get them in the case, but money was spent, must not be wasted without knowing how it turns out.
On tap is one of these;
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor E8500
atop one of these;
EVGA - EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI Motherboard - EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI Motherboard
And two of these;
NVIDIA_Quadro_2000D_datasheet.pdf
The intent is to see if sli can be wrought on two quadro 2000ds without an sli link as 1. I have no link card and 2. quadro 2000ds don't have an sli connector anyway lol. Each quadro 2000d is roughly GTX450 level in performance. There's anecdotal chatter on innernets saying that before a certain driver revision nvid allowed linkless sli, even on quadros. We shall see. Lol if it works might even try 3 way quadro 2000d sli.
All run by 32bit XP Pro, gonna run opera as the browser. There's a cult-like following for XP out there keeping installs alive and I'm joining it.
Oh also one of these;
Creative Worldwide Support - audigy 2
I was concerned mostly about one major problem, what OS to use?
I know I wanted to run XP as XP allows for hardware accelerated sound, something later M$ consumer OS do not. I worried that XP wouldn't have the base drivers to get past the F6 prompt where one adds board/drive controller drivers without halting. I have the drivers for the board but it's a pain to put them into a slipstreamed XP disk or on a floppy (don't think I have one anymore) or on a cd.
This system is peak XP era hardware and it boots amazingly fast for that era, I kept thinking something is going to pop up and change all the plans but no, the board went in the case perfectly. Everything was going all too smoothly. I had no clue if it even worked as I got it years ago and never tested it; it booted! I then decided to run memtest86, if it doesn't pass all memtests there's no point in continuing install until you find out what is causing the errors, could be a bad board, ram, psu, bios setting, etc.
I fired up memtest and held my breath, an hour or so later I walked over to it and it passed all tests, it also showed insane mem bandwidths for cache and even board memory. This told me this thing was going to be a screamer.
I have Vista, XP Pro, 2k, ME, 98, 7, etc OS to choose from but wanted either XP Pro or 7 if XP bested me. Vista as a distant 3rd.
Anyway the XP Pro with SP3 disk was tried and it went swimmingly. I kept waiting for it to either blue screen or pop up an error message stating "install can't continue" but it kept right on going. Needless to say I was stoked. I had a huge smile on my face as the XP install finished. I had a bigger smile on my face when the shutdown tune played after installing the Audigy 2 driver, lol. Hadn't heard that live in what, a decade?
I also found out what went wrong in the system it replaced; the hsf fan decided to go on vacation after being on the job almost daily since 2008, a Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro, was going to use that in the replacement rig as they're both S775 systems. I freaked when after getting the thing to boot and looking at the temp monitor page in bios it said the cpu was around 50c, a glance at the cpu fan told me why, no spinny. Then was concerned I bought a board with a bum cpu fan header circuit, thinking it far more likely the board was bad rather than the fan, when's the last time a hsf fan just stopped working for you? I remembered I had another of the same hsf units from the NF4 s939 AMD system in the parts bin and nicked it, the fan runs fine and the cpu is around 34c now. The degress c is for communist units, degrees f would be for freedom units.
Next you have to consider adding all the missing drivers and direct x, XP allows for DX9C, so that is where it is, any game needing a higher dx level, or a 64bit OS for that matter, is out, this rig will be stricly XP era games only.
A problem that reaered up was two of the drives I wanted to run, well, they sucked. They are Seagate 1TB sata drives, each failed after a few boots and formats. This sux as I have a Seagate 160GB sata drive from freaking 2008 that still runs fine and pulls the same benchmark numbers! But no, 1TB Seagate has to be that way. F you 1 TB Seagates, this is the 3rd one to fail on me. Lesson learned. Was gonna RAID0 them, now it's back to dual 250GB drives in RADI0.
One should also consider what browser to run as most mainstream browsers do not cover XP. I tried Kmeleon and Supermiam or whatev they're called and both work great! I then added a DVD player app and watched some of The 5th Element and Gladiator to see how it performed, it did well.
I wanted to run the Quadro 2000Ds in SLI but nope, it's disabled in Nvidia control panel. Will be running one for a while, I had in the past dreamt of GTX750s in SLI as they have amazing fps per watt performance and are peak XP era hardware, so that is something I plan on adding in the future. That said I do have a matched pair of 7800GTXs complete with Arctic Cooling hsf units, ran them in the NF4 S939 AMD rig. Prob is once you've tasted Angle-Independent Anisotropic Filtering of the 8800GTX class and later cards, well, there's no going back. The 7800 is a worthy card and can be relied on as a fall back, but a single Quadro 2000D is likely more powerful than 7800s in SLI.
So far so good!
One thing that could be mentioned here is if you have drives from a newer OS install you that want to get data off of after installing them into a XP system, well, don't bother. XP uses MBR = Master Boot Record, Win 7, where the drives came from, uses GTR or whatever it's called by default, and XP doesn't even see a formatted drive in that case. I was sure I'd mistakenly nuked hundreds of gigs of movies, anime, apps, music, pdfs, memes, etc when I autoclaved (look it up, great disk erasing app) the Seagate 160gb OS drive before I put XP on it, but no, XP just can't see the partitions. So, back into a Win7 pc the drives will go for data harvesting, then back into the XP pc for a RAID0 array.
Here's some legacy benchmarks for those interested;
get memtest and Passmark here;
After looking at these specs and finding a XP driver for the 1060 gtx, the 1060 might go in the XP box for now lol;
And legacy pttest here;
https://www.passmark.com/products/performancetest/download.php?srsltid=AfmBOorK8iqBFMMIdR0jNbI6dJupkxeZ-3YkND9Y0TxSLIcRQl1oX6Gn
So there's a quandary afoot. Do I put 7 on it so I can run all the games, or leave this one XP era only and build another 7 box for the newer? It's a pain to drag a case out of the hole, unplug everything, push another case in place and plug everything back in just to spend a few minutes playing css or garys mod. The only game I do spend hours playing anymore is T2.
Then I remembered how poorly win 7 treats T2, in my instance it takes a few minutes for the game to freaking start after pressing send on the classic start bat file, T2 also ran less well than under XP. On the same hardware XP can run a great deal faster than 7 too.
I also noticed that 128bit memory channels weren't in operation as I had placed both sticks in adjacent slots closest to the cpu, that means single channel only mode. The original nforce mobo claim to fame was dual channel mem support, something they seem to have kept all through the line. The onboard sound of the original nforce mobo was so clean and good a lot of audiophools bought them for audio work, and it was easy on cpu use too. I thought I had the sticks in the right slots to activate Dual Channel Goodness from the get go, but no, I'm nowhere near the pc expert I imagine I am.
I RTFM'd and found there must be a empty space between sticks o ram if one wants dual channel goodness - if one only has two sticks o ram. If you have 4 sticks and they match and work, you get dual channel goodness. I want dual channel goodness just like any other boy, and by god I got it. Now normally dual channel shenanigans are only of benefit to onboard things such as onboard vid, sound, etc that I am not using. But no, this thing boots so fast now with a simple move of one stick o mem from one slot to tother...... and bam the gates of heaven open, angels sing, memory bandwidth seemingly doubles, I had to be fast on the pause screen button now to stop bios in time to see if dual channel was enabled, EVGA calls this mode "Interleaved" It was henceforth decreed there shall be Interleaved T2 XP goodness.
Na, this one stays XP with XP era hardware, have a gtx 1060 and a i7 around here to build something for the newer games. Might even let it go 64bit and leave 2004 behind. I did some research on getting the 1060 to run in XP, nvid never supported that card in XP but there are, cough, workarounds. I'm guessing some of teh "workarounds" involve russians putting hacked drivers online to entice capitalist pigs like me into downloading communism!
Remember kids, when you download MP3s you're downloading communism!
The above video card driver hysterics lead me into looking at benchmarks for the 1060, quadro 2000d, and a gtx 970 that is available. Also the gtx 7800s. The fing 1060 dwarfs the poor quadro, The quadro dwarfs the poor 7800s, and maddeningly a gtx 970 is neck and neck with the 1060 in almost every category! The 970 is several years older than the 1060. So for now I guess the quadro it is, I do have a line on a local gtx 760, those have literal nvid XP drivers and are a bit better than the quadro as far as gaming goes.
This guy shames me for wanting to give in and put 7 on my puny xp pc;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NsOxG2zwWA
Something I'd wanted to see in this build was reduced ping time from the 790 ultra board, but no. The nforce4 board I had a few years ago had insane networking, Active Armor they called it, when it worked. Problem is, when it worked it also caused data corruption, they never were able to fix it from what i recall so they suggested customers disable the nforce firewall. The intel board I was playing on till recently had a varying ping, from say 5 to 30ms tops, looking at the screen in T2 with the 790 ultra I see a stable high 30s ping. WTF nvidia.
That said I did notice that adding more than say 38 bots my average ping crept higher and higher by a few tens of ms, so 38 bots it is.
Just noticed this while persuing some T1 server code;
function KickDaJackal(%clientId)
{
Net::kick(%clientId, "The FBI has been notified. You better buy a legit copy before they get to your house.");
}
This was in every T1 install, lol.
I wonder how much money they lost on T1 to freeloaders..... Probably a lot of big bucks, for sure....😐️
It still impresses me that this game is still being played in 2025...... Amazing..... & the skill level of some
of the guys playing is just beyond impressive.
As for niche online games from 20+ years ago still being played, it's about as leet as it gets. A friend sent me some old abandonware game that involved mechs running around ancient Egypt themed maps, it was neat! He wanted me to try to get it up and running online, could set up a server or 1v1 as I recall, but we couldn't connect for whatever reason. There's likely no one playing that game anymore, but not all old games from the T1 era are lost. People still play Quake2 like mad, and last time I had cs1.6 installed there were thousands of players in hundreds of servers. I have an idea T2 is kinda unique in that there's such a small but fanatical player base keeping it alive, that said, there may be an even smaller base keeping T1 alive. I suspect the single thing that keeps a lot of these old games alive is they had built in scripting. Some even released source, the holy grail to keeping a game alive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0Ad9rcDCkQ
A word on fb marketplace....
I found a EVGA 760 GTX via fb locally and got it home to find 1 it refused to install a driver easily, and 2 it artifacted to black screen during 3dmark03 benching after I coerced it into taking a driver. So me and the guy are working on a deal to address the issue. Next up on fb marketplace is a brand new 970 GTX, an ideal card for an XP system even though there's no official driver support, there's a more or less simple work around;
That bad 760 deal made me go back to the failsafe Quadro 2000D, a 450GTX class card. Not as powerful as many of the broken cards now sitting in the broke card box were when running, but playable. At 1080p it gets 100fps in T2 combat and will almost touch 300fps if you look at the sky. It also played half life 2 and derivatives just fine, meaning at least 60fps. The 970 is an more or less equivalent to a 1060 GTX, and will run on XP, unlike the 1060. Would love to get the 1060 to run under XP but doubt I can get win7/8 32bit drivers to work in XP with the simple edits as explained at the webpage linked, but who knows. Mebbe Dave Cutler (wrote NT, 2K, XP) based win7/8 such that it can happen, assuming much of XP is in 7/8.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler
As to ues and other untoward behaviour by T2 on XP, the only ue so far was in getting uberchat to play with filtermessage, but after a restart everything just works.
I did some benches on the vid cards and here's the results so far;
Quadro 2000D
=========================
3d Mark 2001 SE 51471
3d Mark 03 34100
----------------------
Aquamark 186063
GFX 34512
CPU 20192
---------------------
Passmark PT Test 5 2214.4
3D 1317.5
970 GTX
========================
3d Mark 2001 SE 66252
3d Mark 03 100796
------------------------
Aquamark 199425
GFX 39111
CPU 20343
------------------------
Passmark PT Test 5 2603.5
3D 4310.9
As you can see only 3DM03 and PT Test showed any real diff between the Quadro 2000D and the 970 GTX. On that note, and this is unusual to say the least, I get about the same fps with the 970 as did the Quadro in T2. Look at the sky and get around 300, anywhere else around 150 or so. That said, had nothing enabled in the Quadro for aa or af, but have aniso set to 16 and msaa set to 2x in the 970, no probs with image quality or frame rate whereas the Quadro would crumble with those settings, especially in Moondance, behind the base looking toward the enemy base the card would often drop into the 20fps region. I suppose the Quadro is only doing what it was designed for, calculating and rendering even the players, vehicles, and structures that are occluded because it isn't race card, it's a CAD/CAM/CAE card, those occluded vertices go ignored by race cards like the 970, hence why it keeps fps up. That said, I find the Quadro 2000D, as lowly and now inexpensive as it is, doesn't even have a molex for direct psu power, with a TDP of around 60 watts, is a beast of a card.
I found the 970 like I did the borked 760 - on fb marketplace. I had to drive a ways to each but the trips were nice. Got the 760 home anticipating crushing nvidia fpses and nope the card flaked out on The Battle of Proxycon benchmark in 3dM03 and crashed the system. Opted several days later for the 970 knowing it could very well also be a ruse to extract monetary units from a sucker, but the guy seemed legit. Anyway I got there and made the deal, got about 20 miles down the road and thought hmmm I don't recall seeing a backplane bracket on the card. Felt around in the box to see if I was imagining things and no, no bracket on card or in box. Pulled over and txtd the guy and he said that is how it came to him, no wonder it wouldn't "fit" in his pc as alleged. I got it home and carefully examined it, it's very clean, but no bracket and the nuts on the DVI ports were finger tight, indicating someone had been in there. Of course. At that point was pretty sure had spent $110 on bum cards, + $ in diesel, and x in travel time. Was thinking hey this could work out as the case it has to go in has these little nubs on the backplane separating each pci card, the case maker apparently didn't consider there might be cards taking up two adjacent pci slots in the future back in 2003 or whenever I got the case. Anyway I also thought hmmmm, that borked 760 had a very familiar looking bracket, picked it up, and it was identical to what was missing from the 970 far as I could tell. So far, $50 for a stupid bracket, $60 for the 970.
Then came the crucible, the gauntlet, would the "refurbed" EVGA 970 GTX even boot? Yes.
Would the EVGA 970 GTX glitch out in benchmarking because it was garbage? Nope.
I made sure the EVGA 970 GTX got good and hot for a few hours, no visual artifacts so far.
Also found links to ppl running old benchmarks on newer hardware;
Lol nice to see some getting more than twice my score.
https://hardforum.com/threads/just-for-fun-3dmark-2001se.2034118/
After thinking about how neither the Quadro or 970 pulled more than 300fps in T2, 32bit color at 1080p, I wondered to myself, well, why did I go to all the trouble acquiring said borked 760 and then 970 if there was no real fps improvement over an fing 450 GTX? Good question.
I think I found an answer, maybe THE answer, regardless it's one I do not like at all. It seems, after perusing various forum there was discussion menitoning after a certain card series, Curie, Tesla, Kepler, Pascal, etc, somewhere around the end of the Tesla architecture, nvid decided they didn't care at all if their cards got insane frame rates in dx8 and older titles. New (post dx8) games were all about programmable shaders and scalar rendering, not legacy hardware transform and lighting and vector rendering. I may literally be cpu bound in this case, the cards simply do not have the power aka optimised shaders for dx8 and lower. I imagine nvid saying What fool is out here in 2025 playing dx8 and older titles? Well, me and you if you play T2.
My 8800s and 260 GTXs would do around 1400fps in T1 and around 700fps in T2 @ 10x7. This 970, far more advanced and powerful than any of my previous cards (other than the 1060) is awful at games coded for dx8 and lower, simple as that. That is why a puny Quadro 2000D (very similar in performance to a 450 GTX) gets the same fps as the behemoth 970 GTX. I try to run 16x aniso, 4x aa, and vsynch enabled along with triple buffer, well, enable any of that in either the Quadro or 970 and the card drops to, at times, 30fps. Leaving the settings at defaults in the Quadros case nets one smooth play and around 100/150fps minimum. Also the cad/cam card Quadro simply actually looks far nicer than the race card 970, all settings being equal, the Quadro looks like it has 4x aa enabled when none is dialed in at all in the control panel. I think I'm gonna sell the 970 and run the Quadro.
In the benches below you see what I am talking about here;
Quadro 2000D
3d Mark 2001 SE 51471
3d Mark 03 34100
======================
970 GTX
3d Mark 2001 SE 66252
3d Mark 03 100796
Notice the dx8 benchmark 2001se hardly shows a difference, comparatively speaking, where the dx9 bench 3dmark03 shows relatively major differences? That may be proof in the concept nvid gave up on dx8 and older.
Just tried maxing out aa settings on a whim before replacing the 970 with the Quadro and with 8x ssaa dialed in it runs fine. I figured ssaa x8 lol no way, it's gonna puke with single digit fps, the card doesn't even notice it. Apparently the newer cards can do dx8 games, if you cause enough work for all those cuda cores. Have to admit the game looks pretty good. The Quadro goes up to I think 14x ssaa lol.