We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

By contrast, I think that every post on HN doesn't need a bucket full of crabs complaining that they can't do the same thing. It's not intellectually stimulating.

I think the first step is to be wealthy and have no kids. That way you have tons of free resources, and tons of free time, and enough free space.

I know plenty of people with enough friends to fill a little LAN like this. And setting one up is fairly cheap, if you don't want to build a house just for it, (a few switches and some cables); but not many adults I know have enough time or free enough calendars to get together for such an event more than once a year.

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Great build! I am certainly taking mental notes for when/if I get my own house one day. The biggest change compared to a regular house is putting the computers in a server room, and this can probably be retrofitted into almost any house during renovation work.

The other big thing in my opinion is the furniture that hides everything away when not in use. I am surprised it cost as much as you say. Well, I suppose that there is a lot of it. Taking a few mental notes here as well.

I have fond memories of university, where we would play UT99 (and DOOM I, believe it or not) in the computer room on Windows XP computers. Staff eventually found out that most of us were playing games over lunch break, so they tightened up the firewalls. However, one of the PC didn't have password protection on the BIOS, so I retrieved the necessary files, and cracked the admin password offline. Good times! The games went on for years.

Back then, around half of us were in a boarding school for a couple years, fully wired with Ethernet and no client isolation despite an extremely restrictive external firewall (that had us using free proxies ~15kB/s to launch Steam, I even saw some students play League of Legends with up to 13s of latency). But LAN was the thing. We had shared NAS, local bittorrent clients, and played soo much UT2004, some Sins of a Solar Empire, supreme commander, dawn of war II, minecraft & a few others.

Unfortunately this friend group is all over the place now, and I don't even allow myself to spend time playing single player games these days. Still, I hope that I'll settle down a bit at some point, and make more local friends. It's easier than people seem to think (for me at least), you don't have to be rich either. Meet a few people, meet their friends, etc.

We used to have LAN parties with my high school friends too, maybe we should try to reconvene, though much driving would be involved.

Even earlier in my life, I was figuring out the rudiments of networking (including these pesky crossover cables) playing Halo 2 with multiple Xboxes.

So yeah, this build resonates with me, thank you for sharing. I've had something similar in mind for a wile, though I think I'd do it a bit differently:

* probably use Linux as a host. On a single or a couple of servers: older games aren't too demanding, and half the fun is in the nostalgia.

* If using a single host, a single link is needed for USB, and can be split over multiple hubs in the gaming room.

* Maybe use GOG installers, they work well for LAN: no DRM, no Internet access required. People can buy a copy if they like the game.

It's tempting to multiplex displays and I/O over the network, but I am concerned about the necessary bandwidth and latency increase. It's also feasible to send all the data in a single optical fiber over multiple wavelengths, however I just looked it up: DP-SFP converters (fiber KVMs) seem to cost more than $1k, so $30 cables are a better option.

Not even close