Dedicated server for online games questions

Factual Questions
1

I have been getting into Battlefield 1942 the past few days. Its a great game.

We have a 1.5/756MB ADSL line serving our home. My PC is a 1.3Ghz Athlon with 756MB RAM, and our second PC is a P3-500 192MB RAM.

I’ve been thinking of making a dedicated server on our second machine.

So, what exactly does a dedicated server do for online games? I understand it runs the game and nothing else, IE, you don’t actually play it on the machine. I can understand that, but does anything show on the screen while it is running, like a console or something? Or can you actually watch the game being played on it?

Is a “moderately” lowly PC like the p3-500/192MB going to be good enough as a dedicated server?

Lastly, any idea how many players could realistically be supported on a 1.5/756 dsl line?

2

For BF:1942, I think you will see a console and that’s pretty much it. You might be able to fire up a client on the same box and play along, though.

I wouldn’t think a P3-500 would be a good server, but you can give it a shot and see how it works. You may be able to get it to suffice for smaller games.

Lastly, this is just a guess, but I’d say you could probably run a 12- or 16-player game on the 1.5GHz box. Hopefully, someone more experienced at running a BF1942 server will come along and straighten us out.

RR

3

I’d imagine a P3 500 would be slow as hell as a BF42 server, it’d make a decent CounterStrike server though.