Halo system link still holds up more than 20 years later | Hacker News Reader

Halo system link still holds up more than 20 years later

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152 pointsbookofjoe59 comments

There were basically VPN services back in the day that would allow you to play Halo CE over the internet with strangers (the game would think it's on a LAN).

This was before Xbox live (Halo CE didn't support live AFAIK), then even afterwards for modded consoles that got banned from live.

I remember that, but I can't remember the name of it. I used it to play Counter-Strike online on my original Xbox before I had a PC capable of playing modern (at the time) games. It was well-populated enough that I could always find plenty of games. Godsend for a kid that couldn't afford the monthly fee for Live.

XBConnect and Xlink Kai if memory serves me right, and I think if you got crafty you could use the likes of Hamachi.

At first it was just fun to play online Halo, then we started diving into the files and modding game types and weapons. The Xbox was such a fantastic console. As someone whom had several GameSharks, hackable is so much of the fun.

Ah, XBConnect. So many fun memories.

Me and my brother connected across the Atlantic to a "server/game" on the east coast, I wanna say upstate New York maybe?

Fantastic bunch of dudes, the main one had a fat fiber pipe so 16 player matches were smooth.

We played alot of "party" style game modes (zombies and duck hunt type games)

And some modded game modes came about that were fantastic fun.

Cat and mouse on the Coagulation map, where the cats were in wraiths, and everyone could spawn in their own warthog to drive using the plasma pistol, wraiths were honour bound to not fire, boost only until the last minute, and hogs had to not hide in bases/caves.

There was also Tremors, with ghosts as the graboids.

XBConnect was solid enough that I could rig a network switch to my desktop, and both our consoles could work with it.

Lost touch with them after Halo 3 when system link above ~20ms got "blocked" :(

I had a couple really long running matches on XBConnect. One in particular I remember was team shotguns on Lockout (Halo 2); the points-to-win was something absurd like 10,000 and it was lasted all day. People would come and go as the day went on. I took a nap, went outside, came back, picked up the controller, and got right back into it. Really not something, as far as I'm aware, you can do now on, e.g., Halo MCC over Xbox Live. Good times!

XBConnect: when you thought your crew is the best in the area.

Modding halo is what got me into programming.

Between soldering LED's into the controller ports, making the xbox logo in the center of the console light up and the xecuter3 modchip, I had so much fun modding the OG xbox. I was first exposed to IRC and FTP through the Xbox modding community. I thought my multi-colored boot screen[1] was the coolest thing ever. Anyone else make the golden warthog skin[2] for halo 2?!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIVLbVoJIvk&t=1m07s

[2] https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/gaming-urban-legends/image...

Our modded Xbox was done by my dad's friend at his work. Somehow I stumbled upon a halo modding forum and learned what I needed to do the most basic mods: ftp to pull the halo2 map files off of the box, using the signing tools to allow for modded maps to be played, and using a hex editor and modding tools to make the smg shoot tank rounds!

My main high school income was from modding Xboxes. It was all just local kids but one of my friend’s brothers worked for a celebrity and one of the Xboxes was apparently featured on MTV’s Cribs so I called it quits.

Why was it possible to mod things like the Xbox, but seems impossible for the iPhone?

What is the key thing that makes it impossible for later tech?

Secureboot style integrity systems that only boot into envs with ubiquitous signature validation and have lots of hardware protections to maintain that in the face of other bugs.

I wonder if size of machine also adds to the difficulty of modding

Gamespy Tunnel as well, although I was always more a fan of XBConnect.

I use to play lots of Call of Duty BR1, I think, on Xlink Kai, it worked pretty well.

And even before that we had services like Kali which would emulate a local network but over the internet for LAN only games. I remember using it to play MechWarrior 2.. poorly, the networking code was never designed to handle large latencies that you would get over modem.

Yep, Kali.

I remember using Kali to play Warcraft. It was tunnelling IPX over TCP/IP, on 28.8k dialup.

It was an amazingly good UX.

I remember the first time I hooked it up, finally found a connection, and connected my OG xbox to someone in the UK (!!!) to play halo CE with.

I was promptly called the N word and exploded on spawn again and again because it was a modded/hacked map.

It was still magical.

LAN parties are fantastic, I did one recently with a few childhood friends as well and they're exactly as fun as they were back then. Playing over the internet is fun but the dynamics of being in the same room is pretty impossible to replace.

Also made much more comfortable by the fact that monitors have gotten flatter. I still have PTSD from carrying CRT monitors around, they felt like they were made out of cement

These days there are so many pc gaming venues around you wouldn’t bother lugging around desktops, just all visit the same gaming bar/cafe.

Maybe in some parts of the world but here in the Midwest of the US… gaming cafes are not common and don’t tend to last in my experience.

A fantastic title on a fantastic console. Maybe it's time to dust off the old Xboxes and organise a LAN party!

Sort of related: I found some interesting news about a reverse-engineered Xbox Live service in development, recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmvDgNAvdWM&t

It helps that the original Xbox came at a time when HD was just starting to be a thing, 3D games were ready for primetime (PSX and N64 were to underpowered), controllers settled into their modern configuration, and ethernet had just become viable for consumers. In a lot of important ways, less changed between 2001 and 2022 than between 1991 and 2001.

While the N64 was indeed underpowered - mostly due to its extremely limited texture cache size - it still represented what I’d describe to be my first true ‘prime time’ experience with 3D in terms of Super Mario 64.

I’d played stuff like Virtua Racing on my Genesis and Star Fox on the SNES, but without texture mapping, there still felt like an awful lot of compromise; moreso like how Atari 2600 games still required a lot of ‘imagination’ compared to even an NES.

My point is, I guess - that Super Mario 64 was the first ‘true’ 3D experience without any compromise I first played.

I get that it’s no ‘Metroid Prime’, and the low poly count and admittedly poor texture quality take away from the experience a bit, but it’s my first memory of a ‘true’ 3D game.

Xbox was HD? Don't remember that.

It supported up to 1080i via component connectors. That doesn't mean all games supported it, though.

It could output 720p or 1080i over component cables, but the vast majority of games did not support it, and the ones that did used lower internal resolutions. Still, 480p looked really good when most people were still watching analogue TV and VHS tapes.

Halo's social features are core to its identity. CE, 2 and 3 were all designed as "an FPS party game". 343 really has no idea what makes Halo Halo. The entire design of Halo Infinite pushes you to NOT play with friends, what a wasted potential. Basically being forced to play solo to progress the battle pass instead of playing with my friends made me drop the game. Not launching with campaign coop was just absolutely boneheaded. Wtf is Microsoft/343 thinking.

At least MCC is good.

>”Not launching with campaign coop was just absolutely boneheaded. Wtf is Microsoft/343 thinking.”

We can’t keep throwing money at this bloated trainwreck, launch the damn game already. Make some excuse about how the revolutionary nature of the open world made it impossible to deliver at launch.

- My hunch.

> Basically being forced to play solo to progress the battle pass

I mean, you can just ignore the battle pass and play what you want. That's what my friends and I do. But TBH, we usually just play MCC because it's got way more content, more options to select what to play, and is far less buggy.

Yes, that's the crux of the issue isn't it? The business model of the game is completely orthogonal to the ways people want to play the game.

What's the point of having a progression system if nobody is incentivized to actually progress? If your entire business model requires that people buy the battle pass, but they don't buy the battle pass because they just want to play with friends because the battle pass contents funnels them into solo play the game won't survive as a F2P title.

Is rollback netcode and prediction really that good that people enjoy playing realtime multiplayer without worrying about latency?

20ms is considered really good ping, but humans can react faster than 20ms. Yet even fighting games are played online. I get that they have good netcode but how does that work?

Meanwhile LAN or an actual wire across systems means almost no ping, and almost no penalty for transmitting extra data. If you wanted you could potentially even use memory-mapped I/O (although that's probably a bad idea). No more complex workarounds required to simulate realtime interaction among distant systems.

You can probably do memory mapped I/O if you use a modern cable and hardware like Thunderbolt.

In fighting games we still have to worry about _network_ latency, as high ping will cause frequent rollbacks. A more accurate way to think about it is that rollback netcode enables very low _input_ latency which makes online feel more like offline, compared to previous implementations that literally delayed controller input while playing online.

Humans cannot react to anything in 20ms, it's closer to 200ms. We consider a move faster than about 18 frames to be effectively unreactable in the heat of gameplay. At 60 FPS that is 300ms.

This depends on the game, a bit. I believe you are talking about reacting to unplanned events. For some games, such as beat-matching ones, where players might have patterns memorized, smaller latencies matter. I remember working on PS game, where Sony requested that we poll input faster than our 60Hz refresh rate so we could apply special "super accurate" bonuses for players that could hit things within such tiny thresholds.

Apparently in Japan where such games are especially popular (or were at the time), players really do appreciate such razor-thin input timing margins.

Yes rollback really is that good. Guilty Gear Strive is an excellent example of it.

Why are you ignore the obvious issue of distance? LANs are great, you just have to be next to each other don't you, which is kind of a HUGE problem.

Everybody who came of age back then has a story of some huge system link game in somebody’s basement for a sleepover/birthday party at some point. It was an era where you didn’t need battle passes or constant content drips to keep interest in a multiplayer game

My next door neighbors bought a 200 ft ethernet cable, and we ran the cable over a fence to connect our two houses to play system link halo. We had a lot of fun playing halo with all the neighborhood kids

Or maybe put another way: it was an era where gaming wasn't as popular as it could be, as it is today, because of a lack of constant content drips.

Or to put it another way: it was an era where the people in charge of producing games cared more about making the experience of playing the game fun and less about diluting the game in favor of squeezing out the maximum amount of profit via dark patterns and psychologically-manipulative Skinner boxes.

What seems sinister or manipulative to you about Skinner boxes? Do you feel the same aversion to training dogs using treats or praise?

Do you feel any aversion to locking people in your house, feeding them only on your schedule, and deciding when they can go to the bathroom?

I must conclude that this is satire, unless you truly see nothing sinister in the notion of sociopathic corporations training humans for drooling obedience in the same way that humans train dogs.

Nah. You are hard with dogs.

At least we train dogs because it’s necessary if you want them to live in harmony within your human family.

Sociopathic corporations treats humans like cattle with moneybags.

Cords are probably always going to be more stable than cordless for the simple reason that atmospheric conditions change whereas cables are shielded from such change.

Ugh, he picked the wrong game to make a counterpoint with. The Switch, and especially Smash Ultimate is fantastic in the same scenario.

You can get 8 wired GameCube controllers to play flawlessly and setup faster than you could on the old XBox setup. You also have the option of ad-hoc network play if everyone had their own Switch. One small console, one optional TV and done.

The Switch was also a terrible example because its still one of the only consoles you can start playing right away with. Insert the cartridge and you're done.

All the other crap usually requires long times of hard disk installing from the disk before you can do anything along with Internet access nagging.

He's spot on though that some games have made a tedious mess in both their multiplayer and single player startup times.

But to my surprise, just a few minutes after we had set up the consoles and connected them for system link play, we plugged in some controllers, made a Halo lobby, and began trash talking each other across the entire house.

Why was that a surprise?

I had a friend who had a Saturn NetLink back in the day, and I believe that was my first experience ever seeing online play, via Daytona USA. Was like some sort of black magick.

obligatory link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZyBuZQ9MEo

We all thought it was pretty darn awesome when the video first circulated some 20 years or so ago... Now, with 5G and always-on devices it's probably not as impressive anymore ...

Wow, this is from way back in the day when you were allowed to put actual music in videos. I wonder how this one slipped past Content ID, maybe it's grandfathered in?

In my (limited) experience sporadically uploading videos for fun the past decade or so, most Content ID matches simply makes a video ineligible for monetization, and enables advertisements on the video. I think copyright owners can still block content, but most seem to allow it (with monetization redirected to whatever corp owns copyright)

It's a hazy memory now, but I remember when the predecessor to the current system wouldn't block the video, but simply remove the original audio, and replace it with something from Youtube's royalty free music library. Did that actually happen, or is it a false memory?

Before (not sure if it's the case now) you had the option of letting YouTube mute the segment that got flagged.

I think they gave the uploader easy UI to do so, not automatic.

Newsflash, game matchmaking 100s of players in a single game across an entire country ensuring they have latest patches to minimise hackers and cheats is slower to load than a wired LAN with known peers and zero risk of bad actors. but hey, nostalgia...

Was the author expecting the xboxes to rot or something?

Well a large portion of them literally corrode their components if left to themselves.

https://hackaday.com/2020/12/14/save-your-original-xbox-from...

Yeah why isn't Epic able to teleport 100 people to the same location with all their hardware included, plugged in and physically connected for seamlessly networking at the press of a button. Damn reality.

You just don’t get it.

It’s nothing against online play. It’s that it is basically not possible anymore. Practically no recent game allows basic server-client over LAN anymore. Like, with a good old TCP or UDP server listening on the host machine.

You need internet for everything and the more people you are, the more you need a solid connexion. And once the server closes, you are done with the game forever. Halo CE LANs will never be done as long as physical support continue to work.

Exceptions are maybe MK8D and SSBU (are there other ?) on Switch but that’s basically it, and there are hard limitations in number of players and I doubt the Switch will last as long as the Xbox as a device (because of battery and cartridges).

And there is this little thing of setting up everything, organizing the room for everyone to have a place to play and while having enough room to put your beer on but yeah, I acknowledge it, _that_ part is nostalgia ;)

Ohh it's nothing against online play, except most of the article that complains about online play.

You all want to wax nostalgic about LAN parties when most of the time everyone was playing pirated versions of games and burning copies of copyrighted content and p*rn onto CDs.... Them's were the days.

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