Cellular vs Satellite: and Dreamcast

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Cellular vs Satellite: and Dreamcast

Post#1 » Thu Dec 06, 2018 6:44 pm

Also let me clear up a misconception. Some people think cellular phone networks are bad for gaming. They are not, when the Dreamcast quit in 2002, I couldn’t game online with anything except Playstation 2 Risk, which was one of the few dial-up compatible games for the PS2, Even World Championship Cards required broadband, and that had no "bluff-cams" available, let alone required.

Sprint was the company that came and let me game on a modern network. Their speeds in 2008 was around 500 kb/s in 200 kb/s out. Xbox’s recommended requirements, were 1 Mb in 250 k out. Xbox say that was the requirement to be able to run EVERYTHING on the Xbox 360.

People confuse it with satellite. A satellite signal is pointed into space, send back down to earth, then traveres the regular internet, and back. Since communication satellites are approximately 30,000 km in geo-synchronous orbit, and the speed of light is 300,000 km/s it takes 100 ms just to reach space, then another 100 to hit the net. Then the response has another 200 ms to reach you, so you got 400 milliseconds of ping time, which in a 60 frame per second game is 17 ms/frame. Network game servers have built in buffers of 150 ms of "leway" to ref the games.

Cellular on the other hand runs along the surface of the Earth, so it just has to go to the nearest Sprint Cell tower that was connected to the internet, which in the 3G era may have been halfway across the country. About 1000-2000 km, which adds at most 15 ms before it hits the network. There may have been a couple questionable connections, but consistent enough. As for speed, I didn’t try to play 40-on-40 Star Wars Battlefront which needs the full 1 MB/s, all I played was 2-4 player games. It was a crap shot, some games would work, some games wouldn’t, that’s why I used my experiences to make 56ok.org

Now with 4G, every tower has a connection to the internet, so at most it’s going to be 10 km, or less than 1 ms of ping added even when you factor a round trip, and speeds have improved to anywhere from 5 Mb/s in 1 Mb/s out if stuck on 3G, which is enough to run Xbox Live and Nintendo , but not enough for Playstation 4 to 40 Mb/s in 20 Mb/s out.

As for the Dreamcast Online, I’m NOT CURRENTLY on cell phone. We "improved" from 3G to DSL, mainly because if we wanted to improve to 4G in 2014, we’d give up our unlimited data clause and either be charged by the Gb beyond the minimum or slowed to dial-up-equivalent 2G once the limit is reached. I’m currently on a 1.5 Mb/s in 400 kb/s out DSL that’s beyond the 3 mile recommended range.

I’m making sure this works with DSL and not add an extra variable of cell phone internet to further complicate the issue.

Are you SURE people aren’t confusing cellular and satellite?

Then again, I tried using Vonage and a free dial-up network and I was getting speeds on Alien Front Online of 48000 baud. But then I remembered, in some voice conversations, more often than with a pre-Vonage phone, that after a moment of silence, we’d step on each other and talk over each other more often than with a Telco phone. So Maybe Vonage adds enough ping to complicate things. Maybe it’s the digtial to analog converisions whihc add a little ping. Maybe that ping time in digital to analog conversions was enough to throw off the Dreamcast ping time. Maybe the Dreampi uses a quicker Digital to analog converter than a stereotypical voip network. Plus the extra distance to go to the Vonage network, then the dial up network, then to the Sega server was too much.

Is dial up more sensitive to ping than a pure digital signal. I guess a test would be trying a voip to other phone source conversation and watch some broadcast TV in the same market, and see if see commercials start at the time we say and they hear it at that time. I notice the "Rita Repulsa Effect" in a cell-to-cell conversation in the same room, and the sound on the phone didn’t match the lips.

And I am extra sensitive to ping time. With a dial up connection, I was able to load Game Show Network's Whammy interactive game online I used the strategy I would use if I got on the show. Just stare at the "big bucks and a spin" square and press the mouse the instant that square lights up. Always bug bucks and a spin, and guaranteed no Whammies. I was able to beat the famous Michael Larson score who instead of pure instant reactions, learned enough of the patterns to pull off his game. Every time I noticed I could pull it off.

The only thing that prevented me form getting higher scores was a 30 second spin time limit, when it stops whether you want it to or not. If I missed a big buck square, I look at the clock, and then spent the last 5-10 seconds looking for a safe time to press stop, hopefully when there’s no whammies showing, but if there’s one showing I look make sure it’s not there and then press, and settle for anything but a whammy. Of course, I burn spins, so I’d run out, also I could make a mistake in this phase, and not see a whammy, and hit it. One time I whammied at 40,000 and rebuilt it back up to 50K, at which case, I gave up with a good showing, but no record.

Then on the Wii version, I tried pulling off the same strategy. I didn’t think I could do it. I was always late. I was usually playing on a LCD screen. Then I read about CRT PIng time being an instant, and every thing else being not, so I did a test. I played the Whammy on a modern macintosh with an LCD screen, and I couldn't do that strategy, because the iMac had an LCD screen. Then I hooked up my ancient iMac computer with a CRT TV, and was able to do the strategy again.

I’ve got to see whether the Wii U introduces ping by default processing in 1080p, even in Wii mode, even when set on 480i mode. I guess the only real way I’d know is hook up my real GameCube compatible Wii to my CRT using Composite cables and seeing if the timing is right, which it should with a genuine Wii if the game is natively programed in 480i, or if the developers realized it would be too easy if too many people thought of my strategy idea.

Remember most contestant on the 80’s Press your Luck never played a video game. Michael Larson even whammied on his first spin because he was used to his VCR pausing wind-down timing, and playing live was Instant. If Ubisoft added a delay, with the Larson Patterns out the window thanks to randomization, then the only way to be successful is stop the frame on a board with no whammies, which takes about a second to change. I was able to do THAT and win every time. With a lot less astronomical scores, but a winner every time. And that would make Fremantle happy if they wish to revive it for 2020. To avoid Larson level payouts, a) randomize, and b) add a delay.

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