Thin Client Workstations and LAN Games

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Railwaymodeler
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Thin Client Workstations and LAN Games

Post by Railwaymodeler »

I hope the community here can help:

I recently had about 25 Capio Technologies type 2995 Thin Client workstations given to me. They boot from a central server using Windows CE. These units have NO internal hard drive, USB ports, or internal CD/DVD drive.

They do have the sound option installed, so I am thinking of a potential way to sell these...

Given the Cyrix MediaGX 180 Mhz CPU inside, and the 64 MB of SIMM RAM I have upgraded them too, anyone know if these might be sellable for old style LAN based games. I think Age of Empires will work on these systems, and AoE supports LAN play.

Anyone know if it is possible to set up a small server unit with AoE installed, and have it playable multiplayer through a LAN using these client machines?

Otherwise I am likely stuck with something hard to sell...
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Re: Thin Client Workstations and LAN Games

Post by Chroelle »

I am thinking they could be functional, but I am unsure if some of the programs will need to be executed on the workstations or on the main server.
Do you have the possibility of checking it?
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Re: Thin Client Workstations and LAN Games

Post by Zyx »

I don't have that much experience with thin clients myself, but a friend's company sells such solutions so this is what I have gathered....

So, the main bottleneck will be graphics framerate, which depends entirely on the server and bandwidth. Even with the latest thin clients and stuff normal desktop stuff runs fine, but they can choke with YouTube. The experience should be somewhat similar to that running it through VNC, if I'm not entirely mistaken.

I guess it depends more on the server than the thin clients.
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Re: Thin Client Workstations and LAN Games

Post by Railwaymodeler »

I recently sold four thin clients to a restaurant that set them up for playing vintage arcade-style games in a kids area. They handle the likes of Pac-Man and similar quite well. OutRun is on there, and even it runs well I remembered that one from when I was a kid (Had it on a Sega GameGear).

I think I now know the best way to sell the rest of them. I did pull the 4 MB SIMM RAM sticks, and replaced them with 32 MB sticks, though.
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