January 21, 2005
XLink Kai
I'm most definitely not a gamer, I have the hand-eye coordination of a snail, but I do enjoy the pretty pictures and being shot dead.
I bought a Xbox a few months ago, it was difficult to choose it over the PS2 but the idea of microsoft losing money for each one sold was pretty motivating (let us not get into marketshare talk now).
I quite liked the cute toy but got bored and chipped it with the Xecuter 3. This is _really_ nice, no more swapping DVD's, etc. It also introduced me to the world of XBMC, the media centre project for Xbox, it seems to use mplayer as its player beneath all the pretty pictures.
Anyway, XBMC comes with Xlink Kai, which I started playing around with yesterday. Since Xbox Live uses a subscription based model (and does not like modchips much (changed serial numbers of hdd's upsets new games on live), a alternative for Xbox gamers arrived.
Xlink Kai captures the broadcast traffic that consoles (well, for Xbox at least) send accross the wire to other consoles on the same LAN and tunnels this traffic to the Xlink-Kai servers. Surprisingly, the latency is ridiculously low and there are *many* gamers of various console-types always online. Even the Xbox-Live headset (teamtalk effort) works fine!
And of course the people on their Gamecube's,PS2's,etc. can all join in on the fun (if there is a compatible game at least). Splendid idea and works extremely well!
Posted by fbotha at 10:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack