bhembree

I'm hoping you guys have already found this but my friends and I use VPN to play IPX/SPX games over the internet. It's easy to do in Win2k and it lets you use spawned installs to play your favorite games. We have used Dungeon Keeper, Starcraft, Dungeon Keeper2, and are looking into others. Just set up one Win2k pc to allow incoming VPN connections and then set up the others to connect to it via "tunneling" through the net. It is somewhat slower than normal but at least you get multiplayer support over the internet from a game you may not have been able to do it with before. ------------------ My Rig: 1.2Ghz Athlon @133FSB 256MB RAM Cheetah 15k RPM SCSI (boot drive and games) 2 IBM Ultrastars RAID 0(MP3 and bulk storage) Plextor SCSI CD Equipment Asus 6600 Pure SGRAM GeForce SB Live Platinum

All joking aside from the above posters I, too, have ran into this issue. Win2k has very strict control of it's memory space and in particular presents a problem in regards to the "chunks" of memory that it provides to games to operate in. This memory space is designed to emulate the kind of space that a game would encounter in a 98 machine. Win2k is inherently more stable because of this in that memory leaks and poor programming techniques are restricted to the window in memory that the OS has provided to it. Once the application terminates then the memory is recovered (theoretically). In a 98 machine that memory isn't policed as well and can in fact consume resources long after the application or game has closed. Cracking techniques can employ memory address spoofing to convince the copy protection that it is seeing what it expects to find on the CD when it is in fact being read from memory. Many of the "cracked .exes" that you get from web sites are designed to redirect that seek for the cd to a memory location. With the draconian control that 2k has over it's memory I am finding that many cracks aren't behaving in the same manner on 2k as they do in their 98 cousins. I expect that this is a more prevalent problem than many folks understand and instead have been attributing the failure of their "backed-up" or "burned" versions of their games failures to Win2k than to the method in which they have cracked the .exe Playing backed up versions of your games is fine and legal and must continue to be possible. I have lost too many games to cd scratches when a backup could have saved the cost of replacing the CD. [This message has been edited by bhembree (edited 28 February 2001).]

I remember reading that regardless of new technology, video from CD-ROM is always played at 4x speed. SO you may have a 1.2 ghz machine with hot drive gear but the video from game cds is only going to play as fast as 4x speed. Add to this the overhead for games you encounter with Win2k and I think you have found your problem. I have searched for a way to increase the caching level associated with CD-ROMS in Win2k but to no avail. Win2k is the superior product but something has to be done about cd-rom performance under Win2k. My Rig: 1.2Ghz Athlon @133FSB 256MB RAM Cheetah 15k RPM SCSI (boot drive and games) 2 IBM Ultrastars RAID 0(MP3 and bulk storage) Plextor SCSI CD Equipment Asus GeForce SB Live Platinum (Creatives Win2k Drivers SUCK--werent we supposed to have the final versions by this time last year?)