Any lan party organiser or participant worth his damn knew a variation of K4HVD-.. by heart for those reinstall situations :P
Memories from old LAN parties
151–160 of 267 posts
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#152My last LAN party was back when everybody was still lugging around CRT's, but despite that being a long time ago, I remember the smell when you'd been inside for several days, pop outside to wake yourself up in the cold outside or to get some drinks when they'd ran out near the end of the event, and then walking back in.
I mostly organized events, so a lot of my time was spend on configuring networks and just general overhead of running events. Always fun: people who configured the wrong IP address so there'd be conflicts and you had to get up on stage, get everybody's attention, and get everyone to check they IP addresses at the same time. DHCP? Lol. After a few events we switched to peg DHCP, that worked remarkably well, as long as you had a few tech support guys who could help people out setting things up.
And also, people bringing extension cords on a roller, not completely unrolling it, plugging in several computers and the wires inside the coil melting as soon as the load was high enough. Smoke coming out, breakers going off, actual flames once.
And then there were the incredulous looks from parents or the occasional girlfriend who stopped by to see what was going on. I found some pictures from an event in a shoe box when I was clearing out my parents' attic a few months ago. I don't understand how any of us ever convinced a woman to have kids with us.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#153My last LAN party was back when everybody was still lugging around CRT's, but despite that being a long time ago, I remember the smell when you'd been inside for several days, pop outside to wake yourself up in the cold outside or to get some drinks when they'd ran out near the end of the event, and then walking back in. I mostly organized events, so a lot of my time was spend on configuring networks and just general…
In the age of slick unibody aluminum slabs inset with a thin black mirror, in the age of fanless battery powered devices that last 10+ hours on a charge... people have forgotten the sound and smell of computing in the bygone age of the LAN party.
The heat of too many CRT screens in a room, of pentiums whirring away, their clacking harddrives and big PSUs filling the room with all sorts of olfactory detritus... the smell of nearly burnt dust being passed over and over again through a gauntlet of hot electronics... the sound and the physicality of powering up a room full of workstations.
And I'm not even talking about the humans using the machines.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#154My last LAN party was back when everybody was still lugging around CRT's, but despite that being a long time ago, I remember the smell when you'd been inside for several days, pop outside to wake yourself up in the cold outside or to get some drinks when they'd ran out near the end of the event, and then walking back in. I mostly organized events, so a lot of my time was spend on configuring networks and just general…
peg-dhcp, for the uninitiated:
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds great! I do a small lan weekend with friends, around 15 ppl, about once a year. But we struggle finding suitable games that are LAN based, and end up playing CS:GO. Would love some more LAN games, any tips?
Sure thing. So a few notes, you can host CS:GO and Dota 2 games on lan. You do have to be logged in to steam and have a network connection, but the games themselves can be played on lan, so the outbound connection doesn't have to be fast. As for some other games, I highly recommend a cracked version of the original WC3:FT, Starcraft, Battlefield 1942 and Vietnam. Some more insane people, start up a 3-day game of Civi…
!!Liero!!
Wow haven't played that in a good 15 years, i used to dream of gauss gun trajectories.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#156My last LAN party was back when everybody was still lugging around CRT's, but despite that being a long time ago, I remember the smell when you'd been inside for several days, pop outside to wake yourself up in the cold outside or to get some drinks when they'd ran out near the end of the event, and then walking back in. I mostly organized events, so a lot of my time was spend on configuring networks and just general…
peg-dhcp, for the uninitiated: https://handwiki.org/wiki/Peg_DHCP
The HiP '97 mentioned in that link is actually where I first learned it and stole it from lol.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#157I stumbled upon the StarCraft CD key thing myself after my sister broke my original CD and case. I had a ripped copy and tried a pattern until it worked. I was maybe 12 and didn't know what an ICQ was.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#158The note about running SC2 over a file share reminds me of my own experience:
In my first professional job I realised their overnight job runs of a custom mission critical optimisation software was actually a VBA program run in MA Access and was also being run over the network share. The databases themselves were small, maybe dozens of MB but not bigger, but the way Access worked is that it would constantly re-read the data over the slow network share.
It was also just generally really flaky and would often run into data quality issues. So you'd cue up the routine and half way through it would crash it require restarting everything from scratch. A lot of cursing was heard* around 9am when people started work and found their overnight job had failed.
All the developers in the company were distracted trying to develop the "proper" replacement, coded in a "real" language (C# iirc) and server based, but the impression I got was it was stuck in development hell, with all the features anyone wanted always being pushed out to "phase 2", while delivery of "phase 1" was nevertheless always slipping futher away any time anyone asked. As a result the old tools were just left to us "analysts" to use without any maintenance (and most these tools had organically grown out of the analyst team's efforts with spreadsheets rather than being developed by the devs anyway).
So I had a poke around and taught myself enough VBA to do some "optimisations", the biggest of which was to simply copy the data locally before executing all the scripts.
I also put in an "integrity checker" which checked for common data errors pre-launch.
The runtime went from overnight to ~10 minutes, with a ~30 second data check you could run first. I looked like an absolute genius.
It eventually dawned on me how disfunctional everything was and I stopped turning up to work, but the impact of those first few weeks of work definitely let me coast the next couple of years.
* This detail is an embellishment, the company was oddly strict about this kind of thing. They also still required jacket and tie in their dress code.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#159My last LAN party was back when everybody was still lugging around CRT's, but despite that being a long time ago, I remember the smell when you'd been inside for several days, pop outside to wake yourself up in the cold outside or to get some drinks when they'd ran out near the end of the event, and then walking back in. I mostly organized events, so a lot of my time was spend on configuring networks and just general…
> And then there were the incredulous looks from parents or the occasional girlfriend who stopped by to see what was going on. I found some pictures from an event in a shoe box when I was clearing out my parents' attic a few months ago. I don't understand how any of us ever convinced a woman to have kids with us.
Same...
My younger brother was still living with my mom... Once a year, around Easter vacation, our mom would leave for two weeks. We'd all (brothers and friends) load up our cars with 'em PC tower and CRTs and set up a LAN at my mom's home. Some of us didn't have cars, so those who did would go and fetch the others.
We'd play mostly Half-Life mods (lots of time on the "small" map: the little one kinda happening mostly inside a little house), Warcraft 2 and then the Counter-Strike beta when it came out.
Sometimes some parent would drive his kid and check that we weren't doing heroine or something and make sure their kid could stay sleep at night. Then tere weren't enough beds of course: so it was sofa, floor, FIFO queue for the beds etc.
Twenty meters long ethernet cables from the 2nd floor to ground level, hanging in the stairway.
I still have one of the Ethernet hub (yup, hub, not switch) from back then: a 10 Mbit/s Farallon hub. Still working fine (I'm not using it but I tried it with some 1 Gbps to 100 Mbps then some 100 Mbps to 10 Mbit/s and then eventually that old hub). Geez did many orcs and firearms shots transit through that hub!
Sadly I only have one picture from that era and it's only showing three CRTs and three people playing, zombie-faced (due to a very real lack of sleep): not the cabling or overall mess.
Then there were the food orders: "Who goes buy eight kebab this time?". Pizza boxes everywhere.
And then the panic two weeks later when our parents were on the road back to their house: a few hours to clean all the mess we left for 15 days.
Not just girlfriends: girls who wanted to hang out with us and maybe become girlfriends and we wouldn't even look at them... With all of us only understanding years later that, well, maybe for some reason they kinda liked us. So they'd drop at the LAN hoping to chill with us, but we'd just play the games nearly 24/7 and eat junk food, not understanding that we weren't very nice to them.
I remember the PC / GPU I'd take being a bit underpowered at first, so I'd mod Counter-Strike not to cheat but to have simpler models: characters made of very simplistic cubes... Game would then render faster.
And the sneakernet going strong: when we wouldn't be playing, we'd be hooking HDDs in the same tower and be copying directories.
We also had HDD "trays" to make copying simpler (who remember these?).
Speaking of reinstalling Windows as in TFA: we had a pirated copy of Ghost, before Norton were to acquire it. In german (none of us would speak german). And we'd image the entire C: drive as soon as Windows was cleanly installed, with all its drivers etc. Re-installs were then faster. My roommate (whom I'd take to the LAN with me of course) once mistakingly "imaged" his broken C: drive to his D: drive where he had all his backups. I remember him being highly pissed off.
What an era.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#160My last LAN party was back when everybody was still lugging around CRT's, but despite that being a long time ago, I remember the smell when you'd been inside for several days, pop outside to wake yourself up in the cold outside or to get some drinks when they'd ran out near the end of the event, and then walking back in. I mostly organized events, so a lot of my time was spend on configuring networks and just general…
I mostly just organized events with friends and my brother's friends. Biggest LAN party we had was around 20 people at our parent's house (back when we still went to high school). Networking was such a nightmare. Either it was trying to get everything configured right, or finding the right cables or getting the right network hub or switch or getting them hooked up right. Half of the first day was always wasted getting everything setup and up and running.
Overall though, loved the experience of playing together with 10-20 people in the same one or two room(s) over an entire weekend.
It's a shame that it's mostly died out. I don't even know who I'd invite to a LAN party nowadays. I certainly don't own a house, much less one as big as my parents'.