I drive on 56k dialup nightly. I connect at 42k usually and yes anything more than 15 people and I'll have big problems. I usually race on anything that pings under 250 ms and rarely disconnect. If I do disconnect, it's usually because I am out of the race and try to download the skins. I have about 50% success on DL'ing skins in the server if the server is close and under 150 ms ping. Don't try to DL skins (you can from the replays) and if you have plenty of servers under 250 ms ping, you will be fine. I am in the US and connect to UK servers quite frequently.
Oh, and I've asked on numerous occasions if I was lagging and have never had anyone complain about me lagging. If I am laggy, I'd appreciate someone letting me know if they see it.
And BTW, I race on Windows 98SE with no antivirus, firewall, etc running in the background that would suddenly start updating. That helps.
56k is possible, I used to play online with it a lot. But with about 12 people and over, you will start lagging and causing accidents. Also have Skin Download turned OFF. If you have it on, it will lag you out. People say they could successfully get the skins, but almost always you will lag out and be disconnected from the server. Those are just a few things you need to look out for.
The Demo doesn't have the skin download, so you don't need to worry about that, but try the demo anyways, you should be just fine.
Yeah, thanks all for replying. I had already taken
the plunge without knowing what I was doing..
First time I ever played a game online.
I started in someone else's car, I was doin pretty
good, running 2nd until I discovered it wasn't me.
I was pretty slow on the uptake because the car
was painted crazy orange and black.
But I joined a race from the pits. Whoa where am I.
I got out of the pits, onto the track and turned
over. It took me about 3 minutes to lookup the
reset button; but the car was a mess so I just
buggered off.
But the system worked marvelously, I'm amazed!