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In the high school computer lab, after I showed my friends how to disconnect from the Novell network so our instructor couldn't watch what we were doing, we use

In the high school computer lab, after I showed my friends how to disconnect from the Novell network so our instructor couldn't watch what we were doing, we used to play a very good Street Fighter 2 clone. I quickly learned all about keyboard ghosting and used it to my advantage to block my opponent from blocking my attacks. When I tried the same tactic on my computer at home, I discovered it didn't have the same problem. The chords that were unrecognizable at school worked just fine on my keyboard at home. I surmised that the difference was in how the keyboards detected the key presses. Over the next few days/weeks I wrote a program that could actually inspect the key queue in memory and mapped out the chords which would fail. I could actually map out what appeared to be groups of keys that caused this problem. I did the same thing for the keyboard I had at my house and while there were some combinations that would lock up the keys, I found that it could handle many more simultaneous keys. Maybe it wasn't so surprising that the next year I started my EE degree?

chewxy 13y ago
Wait Novell Netware still has that bug? I recall in my A levels day, we would disconnect the LAN cable on a Netware client machine to circumvent having to logon to the network, which gave us control of the local machine.
- chinpokomon 13y ago
  It did 20 years ago...
T-hawk 13y ago
Just wondering, was that SF2 clone Super Fighter, with Pho Huang among the characters? I did the same thing about figuring out which keys would block my opponent from moving, both in Super Fighter and in the PC ports of the Mortal Kombat games. Didn't go as far as automatically calculating it per keyboard, though. We actually tried to play honestly without using that for advantage, a gentleman's agreement to only press keys for just as long as you needed.
- chinpokomon 13y ago
  Eventually we decided it was cheating too and called a truce to key smashing. That wouldn't prevent us to use it on occasion as a last ditch effort. ;-) It's been a few years, so I don't remember too much about the game. I only remember it was such a good port that I could learn moves on the clone and that made me a much better player in the arcades. I also played my share of Mortal Kombat and Doom on those desktops. Mortal Kombat was great because it was actually a port by Probe/Acclaim and as far as I could tell it played identically. That became a valuable skill in college. Probably my favorite misuse of equipment was from my senior year of high school. I got myself a 486 DX2-50 monochrome laptop and my friend got a Toshiba color laptop. We hooked up Null MODEM cables and strung them out over a couple seat rows and columns. We played Doom death matches in the middle of class lectures. Having a laptop was unusual. Using one in a classroom, even more so. I don't know if our government teacher thought we were taking notes -- we weren't -- but I don't think he suspected we were playing multiplayer games. Besides, collectively my friends and I had the best grades in the class, so as long as we weren't being disruptive we could pretty much do as we pleased. We were still the only ones who would answer any questions or engage in political debate.
ashmud 13y ago
I used to run Screen Thief when playing two player DOS games. It seemed to help certain key combinations work better. I credited this (whether accurate or not) to ST relocating IRQs.

chewxy 13y ago

Wait Novell Netware still has that bug? I recall in my A levels day, we would disconnect the LAN cable on a Netware client machine to circumvent having to logon to the network, which gave us control of the local machine.

chinpokomon 13y ago
It did 20 years ago...

T-hawk 13y ago

Just wondering, was that SF2 clone Super Fighter, with Pho Huang among the characters? I did the same thing about figuring out which keys would block my opponent from moving, both in Super Fighter and in the PC ports of the Mortal Kombat games. Didn't go as far as automatically calculating it per keyboard, though. We actually tried to play honestly without using that for advantage, a gentleman's agreement to only press keys for just as long as you needed.

chinpokomon 13y ago
Eventually we decided it was cheating too and called a truce to key smashing. That wouldn't prevent us to use it on occasion as a last ditch effort. ;-) It's been a few years, so I don't remember too much about the game. I only remember it was such a good port that I could learn moves on the clone and that made me a much better player in the arcades. I also played my share of Mortal Kombat and Doom on those desktops. Mortal Kombat was great because it was actually a port by Probe/Acclaim and as far as I could tell it played identically. That became a valuable skill in college. Probably my favorite misuse of equipment was from my senior year of high school. I got myself a 486 DX2-50 monochrome laptop and my friend got a Toshiba color laptop. We hooked up Null MODEM cables and strung them out over a couple seat rows and columns. We played Doom death matches in the middle of class lectures. Having a laptop was unusual. Using one in a classroom, even more so. I don't know if our government teacher thought we were taking notes -- we weren't -- but I don't think he suspected we were playing multiplayer games. Besides, collectively my friends and I had the best grades in the class, so as long as we weren't being disruptive we could pretty much do as we pleased. We were still the only ones who would answer any questions or engage in political debate.

ashmud 13y ago

I used to run Screen Thief when playing two player DOS games. It seemed to help certain key combinations work better. I credited this (whether accurate or not) to ST relocating IRQs.