zeRo-liMit

Well, I wasn't violent (even after playing all four GTAs) until I read that article. Now I feel an urge to harm spokespersons for ethnically based foundations. In fact, since that article caused me to feel violent, I should sue a jello factory. Yeah, that's right - I said jello factory. That makes about as much sense as all this "let's sue the game company because we didn't raise our kids worth a crap" bullshit.

These things kick ass!!

Where I live, they only change IPs every few months (like more than four) if not longer. I've got a MTA server running behind broadband at work, and that IP hasn't changed since 0.2.0 came out. A few months is a plenty good ban. The person isn't going to try joining again every single day for months hoping for an IP change. They will give up. My IP isn't static, and we're only paying for bottom of the line DSL. I'm sure ISPs in different parts of the world have different policies, just thought I'd add my experience.

That was pretty fun in Diablo II. It could work fairly well since Vice-City has so many missions that are arranged like a branch instead of being finished one after another, you could each be doing a different one if you wanted to.

Do you have any firewall programs/hardware? I had to put my machine on the WAN side of my firewall to finally fix that problem.

If I see any bikes or cars sitting around on my stunt server, I just drive them into the nearest water and bail out. I don't die, and the vehicles respawn. Vehicle clutter isn't usually a problem. Even less so with deathmatch. Mmm, guns.

Could be a crazy size LCD. Some of them are "wide-screen" style.

The problem is certainly with your soundcard, as DeLuXxX said. The only thing I can add is that you pull all of your other peripherals out after you disable the onboard sound, so that the Terratec has the PCI bus all to itself (aside from HDs of course). A $200 soundcard should have pretty dang good hardware audio processing, so your problem isn't the soundcard sucking, you just need to get your configuration to play nice.

My text blurs noticeably when I have AA turned on (9600Pro). Have you tried messing with your graphics card settings?

I've never had this happen with 0.2.1 or 0.2.2, and I'm always running the servers 24/7 (this is on Win2K).

I assume from this statement that you would consider this to be fairly powerful compared to a celeron 400, since AMD doesn't make anything that weak. Also, let's not forget that every AMD Duron has 1/2 the L2 cache of any celeron, which was the only problem with the celeron in the first place, simply compounded on the Duron.

It will certainly be an improvement. You will still have a few crazy problems, as that's the nature of MTA in its beta form. Problems like people suddenly being on the other side of the city, etc. should be gone though.

Hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and open your Task Manager on that dedicated machine. I'll bet it's totally out of memory. Win2K/XP generally uses 100Mb or more as soon as it's started up, so that's before you run any programs, or the game server. With a program running, or a couple gamers connected, it will be well over 128Mb of RAM. If you can find some RAM laying around, or can spare some from another machine, stick it in there, and give it another try. Your server isn't going to stand a chance when it's using the HD half the time. You could also disable as many services as you possibly can (only if you feel confident), since it's only serving that game anyway. No need for extra crap. Otherwise, as far as speed, the Celery 400 should be just fine for quite a few people.

My LAN MTA server is dual 800MHz PIIIs with 512Mb, connected on the 100mb backbone. I find that each client uses about 7-8Mb of RAM. CPU utilization isn't much that I can tell flipping between machines on the KVM while playing. (this server is also running UT, and HLDS at the same time) I just got MTA setup on here, so the most people I've tested it with is 4, but it's going to get some abuse this weekend. I would imagine that for two people, (as long as you are running a dedicated server) 400MHz w/ 256Mb would be way overkill.

The network at my school was pretty terrible - it was only intended to carry web traffic. Regarding the problems you mentioned though, I don't even have that much trouble on my dialup connection. Ususally someone can run around me or get into a car before I notice, but not any worse than that. I can still kill people about 1/2 the time. My LAN for MTA is 10mb switches with 100mb backbone - my friends and I have never really noticed signifigant sync problems. We always have things like people sliding on the ground while shooting but that's nothing to do with the network. What are some specs of the machines you're using? Do you know anything about the hardware at your school?