Kernel anti-cheat systems are currently the bane of Linux/Steam Deck gaming, haven’t actually proven to be effective at stopping cheaters (see Valorant for an example), and lead to various security concerns from giving 3rd parties full access to your machine to being used to install ransomware and malware.
Windows tried to restrict kernel access years ago, but backed down under pressure from various companies. However Crowdstrike’s outages have shown the sever consequences of leaving kernel access open, and we might finally see kernel access to be cut off.
Those were the days for sure. Dedicated servers were fantastic, you’d often run across the same people in the same server as well and get to know folks. A community, like you said.
yeah remember heat.net?
I don’t but it’s probably pretty region dependent. In Australia I used to play on Internode servers a lot.
ah cool yeah it was this thing in the US where you connected into rooms that had dedicated servers attached to them but under the hood it was all peer to peer I think that would be a server browser for games that didn’t have that like quake, quake 2 and mechwarrior 2, decent. It was run by sega.
What made it crazy awesome is you generated points by logging in and playing to spend in the heat store and they sold like GPUs like voodoo 2 2000s and gaming mice, etc.
It all crashed in a blaze once people figured out you could just camp in games an minimize and keep generating points.
By that point Half-life and Quake 3 was out and had the server browser built in so it was on the way out anyway.
Oh nice that sounds awesome! The only similar kinda thing I remember from back in the day was Microsoft Zone. Used to play a bit of Total Annihilation on there.