Halo 1 + system link + XBConnect is responsible for a huge swath of my career, life, friendships. I remember sitting in my parents basement as a [very young person] marveling at XBC and wondering how it worked. I can still remember the layout of the webpage I found diving into the protocol, how discovery worked, broadcasting discovery packets to 0.0.0.1. I remember opening Ethereal and seeing the packets. I remember, a bit later, hacking together a Java app, failing at a C++ app, many years later trying one in Go and then... pre-drop-@-gc Rust. Wonder if instead of encapsulating packets with src/dst mac I could send a map back and forth and index into it to save the whole... 6 bytes?<p>So many hours of my life spent playing that game. Even recently I re-discovered an old Halo (x)ISO I mastered in high school containing a multitude of map packs that the community had made for it (NMP, NMPv2, CXE, +??). I even hacked them to change their internal map IDs to prevent cache conflicts when switching packs. My friend dug it out of his collection, copied the ISO and I fired it up in XEMU. Wild to see some of those maps, that some random people made with hacked together tools, and wild to read this now, and the comment from /u/dinartem. Even wilder that it's playable emulatable now. Especially given the way MCC massacred Halo1 with the horrendous Halo 1 PC port back to Xbox, and then later to PC again.<p>I'm horrified to see someone comment that multiplayer almost didn't launch with Halo 1. My life would be so unimaginably different.<p>So many memories, this comment doesn't mean much, but what a thing to see on HN.<p>lol, I'm almost tempted to drop my XBConnect Forum name here. I remember when I thought Todd was an absolute god among humans. Oh man, thank you HN for the dose of nostalgia. If anyone remembers a huge block-letter forum signature that was briefly animated ;). The era of sprawling PHP file upload sites. Wow. The internet before it became truly cursed.<p>edit: shout out if anyone knows what I mean by "clear walls". Oh man, what a world.<p>editN: oh wow, "cross over cables" is a phrase I haven't thought of in a long time.<p>editLast: there was a glitch that was supposedly reproducible that caused a tertiary console's player to override the inputs of another console player. Afaik it was never widely discussed, despite repeated claims that it was reproducible on demand. If anyone has any details, you'd make this a truly magical thread for me. <3.