Gaming for truckers

Decided to break out the DOSBOX. Despite the extremely archaic graphics, Corncob is actually a pretty good flight sim.



This is a "thumbs up" using DOS graphics (yes it actually is a thumbs up, it says so in the game instructions). Used to get a kick out of that as a kid lol.

 

I got a kick out of Comcast's new caps announced.

They say 12,000 hours of gaming in a month will get you about 1 tera of traffic and hit their cap, the next block of data could cost you a range of 50 dollars to 200 per billing cycle.

Now I don't know about you, but every game I have ever played online is a minimum of a few hours to about a thousand hours in total for a handful of first person shooters over a period of years if not a decade. A month only contains 4x 168 hour weeks at a time.

I like to live wherever they brightly thought there is 12,000 hours in a month. It will take a University LAN of about roughly 60 gaming computers connected to a fast fiber optic up and down to gain one tera of traffic in a month or 12,000 hours ...

My own traffic is grandfathered, there is a cap of 250 gig per month for new customers, I routinely pull more than that once a year when I rebuild my array. A throw away laptop pulls about half that these days. (I consider all laptops under 400 disposable)

http://www.thv11.com/tech/comcast-adds-home-internet-data-cap/330478856

 

If you have a laptop get the steam client from valve. There are always games on sale and a whole lot of them.

 

So how much data does playing online consume?

 

If you played via a smart phone you can burn one gig in about a hour using a really demanding free to play game. Online really depends on how much up and down you can push to and from the net over a period of time like a month.

I generally approach 200 gig of traffic per month on one computer, gaming and the other doing general downloads of sermons, music etc. Call it 450 gig a month total. When rebuilding my array, the updating etc alone approaches a tera for the month. But it's about 3 days and two nights of constant downloading until the machine in question is healthy and fully updated.

I use both steam and origin and other types of games in addition to old school DVD, CD games from like freaking 1995 onwards. If I wanted to redownload all of the games you are looking at close to a thousand games in total and frankly there is no point. Not enough hours in a whole month. I maintain about 30, playing roughly 10 or less several times a month.

I am not the hardcore gamer I was once, I have discovered a certain amount of relief from stress induced problems in hardcore gaming particularly when it related to dealing with 32 or 64 hardcore gamers who are very strong personalities of all sorts of life, particularly the Government and Military types. Those are the worst opponets to make angry sometimes. I slowed things way down which I can not pull so much data online.

That is another reason I am looking over the television online gaming and the specs that go with them, the disk space offered by them does not seem like you can put in more than several large games on the order of 25 to 40 gig in size plus future patching and updates approaching one gig per week at times. I would have to shuffle titles on those things or find a way to offload onto a external array over ethernet via router to feed a tv game console if it is possible to do it. I am as I write this building such a array, it's 140 dollars from newegg for a 4 disk tower with power supply, and you supply your own hard drives or SSD's for it. With dip switches to determine storage raid type. ranging from zero, through 5 and 10's

When you establish very large arrays like 20 tera, windows approaches a problem when you exceed a certain file size which is truly epic (Around 138 gig or so... roughly in a folder) it runs into a mathematical issue and then blue screens. Literally runs out of room to put a few dozen extra zeros when calculating a movement of a very large folder around.