HALO 2 | System link

[Mave_rick]

Hey there, 

I have finally got two working hard modded Xbox's both with 2 Tb SATA HDD (a v1.0 with Xblast Lite and v1.6 with Aladdin XT Plus2) Bonus is they both have converted 360 component cables. I am also going to attempt the 128Mb RAM upgrade on my v1.0.

Currently in the process to try find 4x more OG controllers to have a 4v4 halo match,

First question) I remember reading about running the Halo match from a dedicated 3rd Xbox with some other version of Halo? , I guess it reduces lag between the connected Xbox's?

Also) If I got a 3rd Xbox, would it be best to run the match from the Xbox with 128Mb RAM? 

Cheers for any help, or pointing me in the right direction 

[Bowlsnapper]

I can't imagine, logically, why hosting the game on an extra Xbox would cut down on "lag". Any modern router should be able to handle the load of a 20 year old TCP system link. As far as I'm aware, there is no server-only version of Halo, for the Xbox, 1 or 2. Nah disregard this. You shouldn't have any latency problems.

And since that's the case, don't worry about RAM amounts.  The only real advantage to the extra ram is being able to run some arcade games that were ported over, running heavier emulators that are prone to crashing on 64mb of RAM (like surreal64) and running most of the 720p .xbe files for retail games. And maybe some video files that cause XBMC to crash.

Edited February 8, 2022 by Bowlsnapper

[OGXbox Admin]

8 hours ago, Bowlsnapper said:

I can't imagine, logically, why hosting the game on an extra Xbox would cut down on "lag". Any modern router should be able to handle the load of a 20 year old TCP system link. As far as I'm aware, there is no server-only version of Halo, for the Xbox, 1 or 2. Nah disregard this. You shouldn't have any latency problems.

And since that's the case, don't worry about RAM amounts.  The only real advantage to the extra ram is being able to run some arcade games that were ported over, running heavier emulators that are prone to crashing on 64mb of RAM (like surreal64) and running most of the 720p .xbe files for retail games. And maybe some video files that cause XBMC to crash.

It's called Halo NHE or neutral host edition
https://halo1nhe.com/

The host xbox always has host advantage. People have done some videos to prove it. This make the host xbox an NPC and therefore nobody playing is hosting. 

[Bowlsnapper]

4 minutes ago, OGXbox Admin said:

It's called Halo NHE or neutral host edition
https://halo1nhe.com/

The host xbox always has host advantage. People have done some videos to prove it. This make the host xbox an NPC and therefore nobody playing is hosting. 

WOW! How have I not seen this yet!? I am a tool! My foot is in my mouth!

Host machine has the advantage? How?

[OGXbox Admin]

7 minutes ago, Bowlsnapper said:

WOW! How have I not seen this yet!? I am a tool! My foot is in my mouth!

Host machine has the advantage? How?

the client xboxes have to send and receive updates to and from the xbox acting as a server. There is latency in both directions. The host xbox has no such thing. It doesn't need to wait on updates. It's current version of events is what the player on that xbox sees no matter the latency from the other xboxes. They never have any sort of lag at all while the other players do have some... even if it is small. It doesn't take much latency at all to give a HUGE advantage. That's why the host xbox wins more times than not. 

[Bowlsnapper]

15 minutes ago, OGXbox Admin said:

the client xboxes have to send and receive updates to and from the xbox acting as a server. There is latency in both directions. The host xbox has no such thing. It doesn't need to wait on updates. It's current version of events is what the player on that xbox sees no matter the latency from the other xboxes. They never have any sort of lag at all while the other players do have some... even if it is small. It doesn't take much latency at all to give a HUGE advantage. That's why the host xbox wins more times than not. 

Yeah i understand. I thought things like kills had to be negotiated with the client to some extent. But what you're saying is everything takes place on the host and that the client is more of a "remote terminal", for lack of a more appropriate term?

[OGXbox Admin]

6 minutes ago, Bowlsnapper said:

Yeah i understand. I thought things like kills had to be negotiated with the client to some extent. But what you're saying is everything takes place on the host and that the client is more of a "remote terminal", for lack of a more appropriate term?

That's exactly right. In the peer to peer model like this, the kills are decided by the host. 
Halo 2 was a client-side hit detection model. So while the clients still report back positioning to the server, the client decides if a hit took place and notifies the server of that. 

[Bowlsnapper]

47 minutes ago, OGXbox Admin said:

That's exactly right. In the peer to peer model like this, the kills are decided by the host. 
Halo 2 was a client-side hit detection model. So while the clients still report back positioning to the server, the client decides if a hit took place and notifies the server of that. 

See, THAT'S how I thought it was for CE/1. It makes sense to do it that way. Wonder why it's done in 2 but not 1? Maybe because it was designed with XBL in mind and latency was more of a concern, so it was implemented in the interest of optimization and fairness.