f13.net

I need to be able to connect to my PC at home which runs XP home edition. Do any of you know of anything I can use on my home PC that will work with the native Remote Desktop session in XP Pro? And yes, I know buying XP Pro will work. I mean something free/cheap and reliable.

My Eve mining career thanks you in advance.

http://www.realvnc.com/products/free/4.1/winvnc.html

As far as I know Remote Desktop is only in XP Pro and Windows Server.

edit: VNC works great though.  Use it all the time.

edit the second:  I forgot, if you only want to connect to an XP Pro computer from an XP home you can use an app that loads in your browser:  http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/expert/northrup_03may16.mspx

Remote Desktop Connection works from XP Home to XP Pro just not the other way around.

I haven't heard of any remote connection product that will work with DirectX so I don't think that would work.

I've actually used an app, once, that allowed me to totally control another PC remotely. I was even able to browse files, launch some pr0n, and then watch as the user (friend of mine) quickly tried to close the file down.

Unfortunately, I think someone has to be on the other end to authorize the connection.


Also, I know I could have launched a game, but I'm not sure if it would have displayed properly, or if I would have been able to control anything.

It almost certainly would not have worked.

Besides which trying to play a 3D game remotely over a network connection would entail something like:

1024 x 768 resolution * 3 bytes per pixel (we'll ignore the alpha channel) = 2,359,296 bytes per frame
2,359,296 bytes per frame * 30 frames per second = 70,778,880 bytes per second transfer rate
70,778,880 bytes per second transfer rate * 8 bits per byte / (1024 * 1024) = 540 Mbps connection speed

Not going to happen anytime soon.

Even if you tried to play at 10 frames per second that would still require a 188 Mbps connection which is faster than Fast Ethernet so you wouldn't even be able to do it over a LAN unless you had Gigabit Ethernet. About 5 frames per second would just about work on Fast Ethernet which is in fact what Windows Media Player does when you view it through Remote Desktop -- i.e. it cuts down the frame rate to the low single digits to fit within the available bandwidth.

These products do work for 2D desktop apps because those things don't change all that often on the screen and when they do change you can just send a "delta" -- the differences between the current frame and the previous one. As I said above that breaks down when most of the pixels are changing on every frame and you need many updates per second.

As a long time RDC user I can tell you that it won't work, irrespective of performance. RDC doesn't allow D3D display - windowed or fullscreen. You can only run games that have a terminal style interface. Even with enough bandwidth and horsepower RDC won't display a D3D application - unfortunately...

Yes with RDC the remote DirectX game will complain that it can't find an accelerated graphics card. However Strazos wasn't using RDC since the person on the other end could see what he was doing. With RDC the remote computer gets kicked back to the login screen so nobody else can be using it while you are connected. Something like pcAnywhere, though, let's both people "share" the computer which can be amusing since you are both fighting over the position of the cursor.

I thought that VNC worked by taking screen shots and sending those images across the network?  If that was the case it should work for what is intended.  I don't know, I only use it to connect to various linux/unix boxes at work.

Actually, with the App I was using, we each had a cursor. It was a pretty amusing way to burn time between classes one day.

I have played D2 over VNC before.  Briefly.  It's definately not ideal, but doable.  Also, was on campus intranet, so the connection between PCs was about 10Mbit quality.

For a slower paced game like Eve, it might be doable.  You will definately have to run in a window(VNC hates resolution changing), and it will be painful, but doable, depending on your server's 'net connection.  If you're on ADSL, don't even bother, the 384k uploads aren't gonna hack it unless mining requires no reaction times under 3-5 seconds or so.  If you're on cable at the server point, it's sometimes symmetrical, so you'll likely have good enough upload rates to do okay, depending on general internet bandwidth/latency issues.

Also, leave yourself logged in on the server.  VNC can now handle the ctrl-alt-delete to login or 'welcome' screens, but it doesn't do so very well, best to just avoid them when using it.

Finally, check the various different builds of VNC, some may work better for you than others.  Ones I know of are RealVNC, UltraVNC, and TightVNC, tho there may be others.  Each has branched off the original project, which was closed down some time ago, and each went its own way.  All allow free download for personal use, afaik.

--
Alkiera

I think you're describing early editions of Norton's PC Anywhere. I could be wrong tho.