Running MMO's from external hard drive question?

XMORTIS

 Ok i got all the trials for all the games reccomended here, although the uo gateway thing has me confused. But I have them all loaded to external HD as my internal couldnt fit them all. Is it possible to install a small part of the file to my computer, and have it run off external hd?

Again thanks guys, you are allways a great help.

resilience

I say there's no hurt in trying, but you should realize that running it off your external HD will be cause for choppy gameplay and/or latency. If you are going to do this make sure you are using usb2 or firewire.

tubelight

i have run countless MMO's of my external USB 80GB HDD without a hitch. Some notable games include EVE Online, Cabal, Ragnarok, City of Heroes/Villains.

While installing these games i chose the external HDD

XMORTIS

i allways download them to external, but when i run them from there they seem to load up and sometimes they will even establish a connection with the update server, then application fail message.  I understand what tube is saying, hopefully that is the problem thank you very much ill reinstall.

goneglockin

Be careful if you are thinking about dicussing information regarding Ultima Online and the "unofficial" servers...

CleffyII

Remember, you have to deal with the fact of data transmission.  The games tubelight is playing really don't produce alot of transmissions from the HDD to the Processor/Memory, infact with his ram; entire games can be pre-loaded onto his machine.  This fixes the latency problem.  But when you are dealing with modern/load intensive games like Oblivion and EQ2, then you will probably get choppy gameplay because it has to constantly send files to the mainboard which is inhibited by your wire's speed.

Also remember, that games store registry cookies in your windows folder.  If you move your HD to another machine, it probably won't work because of the missing cookies.

tubelight

cleffy does have a point there, even a game like guild wars might lag from an external drive. but cleffy i use the HDD at work and at home but i've never faced a registry error, maybe im just lucky :P

docminus

i noticed that most mmo's can be safely copied from one machine to the other without using the installer. they still run fine. some might write the registry keys if needed, some don't seem to need a registry key.
examples are UO, SWG, Ryzome, ATID3, L2,  WoW, Eve, just to name a few. In SWG case, you had to tell the  programme the installation path in the launchpad, that was about it.

guess this is due to the fact that a copy protection is not necessary. to play, you need an account....