Halo 1 + system link + XBConnect is responsible for a huge swath of my career, life, friendships. I remember sitting in my parents basement as a [very young person] marveling at XBC and wondering how it worked. I can still remember the layout of the webpage I found diving into the protocol, how discovery worked, broadcasting discovery packets to 0.0.0.1. I remember opening Ethereal and seeing the packets. I remember, a bit later, hacking together a Java app, failing at a C++ app, many years later trying one in Go and then... pre-drop-@-gc Rust. Wonder if instead of encapsulating packets with src/dst mac I could send a map back and forth and index into it to save the whole... 6 bytes?
So many hours of my life spent playing that game. Even recently I re-discovered an old Halo (x)ISO I mastered in high school containing a multitude of map packs that the community had made for it (NMP, NMPv2, CXE, +??). I even hacked them to change their internal map IDs to prevent cache conflicts when switching packs. My friend dug it out of his collection, copied the ISO and I fired it up in XEMU. Wild to see some of those maps, that some random people made with hacked together tools, and wild to read this now, and the comment from /u/dinartem. Even wilder that it's playable emulatable now. Especially given the way MCC massacred Halo1 with the horrendous Halo 1 PC port back to Xbox, and then later to PC again.
I'm horrified to see someone comment that multiplayer almost didn't launch with Halo 1. My life would be so unimaginably different.
So many memories, this comment doesn't mean much, but what a thing to see on HN.
lol, I'm almost tempted to drop my XBConnect Forum name here. I remember when I thought Todd was an absolute god among humans. Oh man, thank you HN for the dose of nostalgia. If anyone remembers a huge block-letter forum signature that was briefly animated ;). The era of sprawling PHP file upload sites. Wow. The internet before it became truly cursed.
edit: shout out if anyone knows what I mean by "clear walls". Oh man, what a world.
editN: oh wow, "cross over cables" is a phrase I haven't thought of in a long time.
editLast: there was a glitch that was supposedly reproducible that caused a tertiary console's player to override the inputs of another console player. Afaik it was never widely discussed, despite repeated claims that it was reproducible on demand. If anyone has any details, you'd make this a truly magical thread for me. <3.
For your last edit, I've only seen that glitch twice: once in a youtube video [1], and once in one of my own games on XBConnect. I heard similar unsubstantiated claims of intentionally reproducing the glitch, but didn't dig too far into it myself.
>Especially given the way MCC massacred Halo1 with the horrendous Halo 1 PC port back to Xbox, and then later to PC again.
MCC launched in a terrible state, but it's had a crazy amount of deep improvements over the years and I think all of the big known issues of the original Halo PC port have been addressed since a few years ago.
No, it really hasn't. https://halobugs.com/ I have hundreds of hours in Halo 1 and play MCC regularly. Halo 1 PC players don't understand because these bugs originated in the original Xbox->PC port, and they've never known what it should actually feel like.
I mean hell, when they first launched MCC, fall damage jumping off the base in BG was wrong. You can feel the effect of the Gearbox port to this day. I mean, did they even fix the pistol spread issue? Not that that would be important or anything.
You're speaking my language friend, and honestly half of this reads like I could have written it myself. I was obsessed with video games and knew I wanted to be a programmer before CE, but H1 on XBC, combined with LANs in high school and thousands of hours of split screen in college truly laid the passion for "how does all this work" and my current career.
I don't play CE as much, my doubles partner and I still hop on MCC every few months for a little nostalgia hit, but we're admittedly not the types that felt that Halo completely died after CE (although nothing ever felt as good after), so these days we generally play BTB Reach/H3, or 4s or Squad Battle on Infinite.
You just put the absolute biggest grin on my face. HN was all worth it, somehow. And wow, am I not surprised to hear Squad Battle is your favorite. Somehow I'm sure we've played some games over the years.
So many hours of my life spent playing that game. Even recently I re-discovered an old Halo (x)ISO I mastered in high school containing a multitude of map packs that the community had made for it (NMP, NMPv2, CXE, +??). I even hacked them to change their internal map IDs to prevent cache conflicts when switching packs. My friend dug it out of his collection, copied the ISO and I fired it up in XEMU. Wild to see some of those maps, that some random people made with hacked together tools, and wild to read this now, and the comment from /u/dinartem. Even wilder that it's playable emulatable now. Especially given the way MCC massacred Halo1 with the horrendous Halo 1 PC port back to Xbox, and then later to PC again.
I'm horrified to see someone comment that multiplayer almost didn't launch with Halo 1. My life would be so unimaginably different.
So many memories, this comment doesn't mean much, but what a thing to see on HN.
lol, I'm almost tempted to drop my XBConnect Forum name here. I remember when I thought Todd was an absolute god among humans. Oh man, thank you HN for the dose of nostalgia. If anyone remembers a huge block-letter forum signature that was briefly animated ;). The era of sprawling PHP file upload sites. Wow. The internet before it became truly cursed.
edit: shout out if anyone knows what I mean by "clear walls". Oh man, what a world.
editN: oh wow, "cross over cables" is a phrase I haven't thought of in a long time.
editLast: there was a glitch that was supposedly reproducible that caused a tertiary console's player to override the inputs of another console player. Afaik it was never widely discussed, despite repeated claims that it was reproducible on demand. If anyone has any details, you'd make this a truly magical thread for me. <3.