Community Mysterious gaming questions you don't expect anyone to actually answer

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old school cool
Nov 1, 2018
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Post any questions you've had (better if you're pretty sure nobody will be able to answer) regarding anything gaming: Maybe why a certain game was developed a certain way, or some technical mystery, whatever happened to x, a composer of a specific game song, or what a specific developer was thinking when making some old game...

I'm not sure if I'm the only one that has some questions like this, but I suspect a few of you might. Anyways I'll post some of mine. I expect nobody will actually be able to answer...

My first question: When I used to play Everquest on old dialup, whenever an enemy NPC charmed me, I would ALWAYS be disconnected from my Internet rather quickly. Sure, I got disconnects at some other random times, but if I was charmed in EQ, that was it. Disconnect within 3 seconds.

My theory was that while being charmed the server was flooding my connection with updates on where my player was located, so my connect was saturated. Either that or the info from the server looked a lot like the dialup disconnect message that all it took was a little physical interference and some packet would be interpreted as a disconnect...

I expect this would be extremely hard to replicate today, but there might be some alive that would be able to figure it out.


My second question: Was there ever a US TV commercial with NEC's / Hudson's Zonk depicted as a cartoon in it, or is this a false memory of mine? While there's no evidence this existed, I'd probably need a time machine and a year to prove it to myself... pretty boring task too.



I'm curious to read some of the greatest gaming mysteries in the minds of this community.
 
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EdwardTivrusky

Good Morning, Weather Hackers!
Dec 8, 2018
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RE: Everquest and Disconnects. You may be on to something there. I know that Everquest was advanced for it's time and used both UDP & TCP for it's networking traffic. UDP was used whenever network speed was required over accuracy as missed UDP packets were not resent but TCP packets are so when it needed to ensure accuracy it would switch to TCP. At the time this was pretty advanced tech for gaming.