I play Halflife on line at servers and also join other players at home, or host a game myself sometimes. My prob is, I have a 56k modem, and my friend has 56k modem. We can not always connect to each other. I have heard it is the 56k modems, 56k to cable ok, cable to cable ok, 56k to 56k is no good. Does anyone know of this, and is this definitely correct?
Ian

Re: Halflife online

Playing Half Life, or any other game, modem to modem 'direct' over the internet is probably not the best way to do things. It should work, but you will most likely face significant lag. This is because a modem connection tends to have a ping of around 200-300ms by itself to your ISP. If you connect to another modem this ping is effectively doubled to 400-600ms which should make a game like Half Life much harder, and less enjoyable, to play online when compared to connecting to a server that you both have a ping time of 200ms to. This would be an explanation for why the other options (all of which involve one connection having a very low ping) would work better for you.

A solution would be to directly dial each other without playing over the internet, this would cut out the extra lag involved with playing over the Internet.