Play Games Over Network Drive???

Is it possible to configure the network to allow various computers to play a game over a shared harddrive? Meaning.... there is an external HDD connected to computer A --> the HDD is shared over the network. Computer B would like to play a game installed on the HDD connected to computer A.

Is it possible? Or do we need to setup some kind of server configuration instead. Can it be done with existing hardware?

Thanks,
BankBen

 

Interesting question I'd like to know if that is possible too,and I would think so if you set an network drive might be reaching here though.

 

my friends tried to do this with tribes. its a pretty old game. basically the network had trouble both running multiple instances of a game across the network and streaming game data back and forthat the same time.

its certainly possible depending on the game

quite possibly not the best solution.

you're pretty much stuck installing the game on each system locally to avoid cd check / key problems (especially on newer games)

 

It is possible to do this with older games on regular hardware.

I used to have to crack down on the kids at my highschool for leaving quake 2 in an open share.

But as for a more modern game? No, not really. Well... you could get a NAS.

Plus. This aint legal and I dont think I should further encourage that activity.

 

Hmm interesting. Never tried it, but I guess it would seem possible. But I would expect it to be laggy at some times.

 

Well some games require a different cd key per user...even for LAN play. You could do a registry hack and load it in a share and as long as you had a registry entry for the game I am guesing you could use it. But most games legally no.

 

Depends on the game, yes. And a lot of games depend on config files in their program directory, rather than proper practice of per-user configuration, so if you run the same copy of the game twice, you get them stomping all over each other with the config.
I HAVE run Quake 3 just like you're proposing, and it works fine. But there are very few games that it'll work nicely with.

 

Hmm, that would be a neat idea... but I would sense some sort of lag. I know, between my Laptop, Desktop, and Vaio (P4 HT 3.2GHz, Ati Radeon 9800, 1G PC3200 RAM), I will LAN Counter Strike: Source, or Condition Zero when the guys are over. It can be fun, but I have 3 different accounts, with 3 different keys, so it doesn't ever have a problem.

 

Most games don't really write to the drive, or even read from it, very often. So there's not much lag at all. They load what they need in RAM, and then run. The only slow parts are loading and changing maps, etc. So it depends on what your game does, what registry keys it needs and sets and how it does that (if at all), if it has self-contained configuration files in the system directory, on on a per-user basis, etc. So there's no quick answer, but it is do-able, and even pretty decent speed. We had 20+ people playing Quake 3 off the same network share with no apparent difference from running a copy locally.