- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
You do NOT have to double the gamespy, place an icon for it on the desktop or register your copy with gamespy. I don't suggest you do either.
Yeah, if you're just having trouble with gamespy, you might try a different sever browser like xfire (preffered) or The All Seeing Eye from yahoo (it works, mostly...).
We need to know about your internet connection though. Are you DSL or dial up? if you're dial up and the connection just doesn't seem to be working or you start to connect and it crashes, it could be that you have a partitioned 26k connection from your phone company or ISP. If this is the case, we can't help you. Halo won't play on that, period, and you won't be able to connect to any servers.
I know this because I had a 26k partitioned connection a while back. I couldn't connect to gamespy either until I dished out the green for DSL.
If you've already registered with Gamespy, go to http://www.lavasoftusa.com/ and get the freeware of Ad-aware. It'll clean those pesky spywares off (even if they're Windows spyware). I've said it before, I'll say it again: Ad-aware doesn't care. It kills em all!
Finally, you mentioned LAN and half a dozen alarm bells went off in my head: if you're trying to join a game on a LAN, you have to have Halo running to two computers on your Local Area Network. Correct me if i'm wrong, but that means you have to have halo PC running on two computers in your HOUSE!
If you're trying to join a LAN game, there's a big part of your problem. Choose internet game from the file server and you should get about eight pages of hits for PC, and 2 to 3 pages for Custom Edition.
Also, your firewall may give you trouble. Try shutting it down while you start up halo PC and go into multiplayer. If you connect without problems, you may need to change the settings of your firewall to allow Halo PC to go through. personally, i'd have to dumb down ZA so much it wouldn't be worth running, so I tend to turn it off and trust to my NAT when i'm running Halo. If you have a NAT firewall, you may have to enable port forwarding to let Halo out, but I've never had any problem with it.
Now, once you get on with (well, whichever...) if you're having trouble finding servers, adjust your filter settings. if you're only looking for CTF games, it will not show you King of the Hill or Oddball or any other server playing these games. it will only show you games playing CTF. Also, if you have your ping set too low in the filter and you live in the boonies, you may not see any server. Open the paramaters on the filter as wide as they can go and you should see tons of servers on PC and a fair amount on CE.
A lot of this stuff I'm saying has already been posted in the Guides sticky right here in the Maw. Check there, others have already explained it better than I.
Hope that helped MorphKing.
[Edited on 8/14/2005]