> In September of 2021, the content server for Massive Ads (http://madserver.net) started delivering blank content to anyone that requested it. Presumably, Microsoft shut down the service. Of course, this had the effect of knocking a few games offline that couldn’t understand the responses they were getting. I sent a few emails to Microsoft and they were helpful enough to refuse connections to the address. So as of now, you should be able to play SWAT 4 again.

Neat fix - presumably an empty response blew up the XML parser but ECONNREFUSED escapes to safer code?

It would have to handle ECONNREFUSED etc to work in offline scenarios or on firewalled networks, I suppose?

This makes sense since "rendered unplayable while connected to the internet" sort of implies if you disabled your internet, everything started working again.

Neat fix for a solution that was flawed to begin with. Sending blank 200 response is a bad idea. If your service stops, stop sending 200 status responses to any client.

As I understand it, the blank 200s were needed for other games which didn't handle the connect refusal as gracefully .

Right, the game shouldn't have crashed regardless of the response from a web service, let alone an ad one.

Bit unrelated, but I really like that domain name. Looks like "mad"