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Memories from old LAN parties

thomask.sdf.org

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Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#11

Post by Tomte »

oaththrowaway wrote: post #6

I've only done a few LAN parties in the last handful of years, and they weren't quite as magical as doing it as a teenager where you spend 75% of the time deciding on what to play and then figuring out how to crack it so everyone can play.

Don't forget getting 10BaseT, NetBEUI and IPX to work on all players' computers [1]. Easily half a day was lost every time, but it was part of it, and almost fun.

[1] Extra points if a player had participated in another LAN party with other people and had changed some or the other Windows network setting for that LAN party. "It worked last month and I did not change anything!" was always only true until the "and".

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#13

Post by _jplc »

Some personal memories:

A switch might explode by using the wrong power adapter and still work afterwards somehow.

At my high school, every computer was on unrestricted LAN divided by floors. Four classrooms playing Armagetron (the open source tron clone) was a LAN party I didn’t expect.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#14

Post by AnotherGoodName »

thesnide wrote: post #4

I remember thinking this TCP/IP will never work out, too complex. Whereas IPX works just perfectly. DHCP was a god send that proved me wrong. Well, until someone, somewhere forgot to disable its own server...

Ipx itself worked but in the same era we had bus topology and boy was that a pain.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#15

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

Tomte wrote: post #11
oaththrowaway wrote: post #6

I've only done a few LAN parties in the last handful of years, and they weren't quite as magical as doing it as a teenager where you spend 75% of the time deciding on what to play and then figuring out how to crack it so everyone can play.

Don't forget getting 10BaseT, NetBEUI and IPX to work on all players' computers [1]. Easily half a day was lost every time, but it was part of it, and almost fun. [1] Extra points if a player had participated in another LAN party with other people and had changed some or the other Windows network setting for that LAN party. "It worked last month and I did not change anything!" was always only true until the "and".

Easyly solvable by booting some very early linux flom floppy disk(s), doing that 192.168.x.x/255.255.255.0 shit, pinging and arping around, making notices. Rebooting into Windoze and resetting shit according to those notices. Done in 30 mins max.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#16

Post by jholman »

pluc wrote: post #9

I remember writing a tool that blared a siren wav every time someone connected to your network share. It would be quiet at the start of a round, and then as people died you'd hear sirens going off left and right. Remains one of the few contexts where nerds would do drugs. Speed mostly. You ever played Quake with a bunch of dudes on speed? It's fucking nuts. The smells. Some LANs would go on for a week. Lots spanned s…

> It was great when LCDs came about.

Once upon a time, I owned a 19" CRT that weighed less than a typical 17" CRT. Such good fortune. Still, I never did have the courage to carry my tower on one hip and my monitor on the other (and everything else in a backpack), so I guess it didn't really benefit me that much after all.

> most lasted upwards of 12 hours.

You're damn right. Imagine carting a CRT around and then only staying for half a day. Ha!

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#17

Post by spookthesunset »

thesnide wrote: post #4

I remember thinking this TCP/IP will never work out, too complex. Whereas IPX works just perfectly. DHCP was a god send that proved me wrong. Well, until someone, somewhere forgot to disable its own server...

I remember this too. IPX just worked for LAN games. Anything else never worked right.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#20

Post by pvorb »

> If someone has shared their installation of Warcraft III over SMB it will run much faster if you copy it to your local machine first rather than execute it directly from the network folder.

This one made me laugh. I'm really surprised it started that way at all.

I think my LAN party time was a little later than most of what the author is describing (mostly Windows XP era), but I also remember the networking problems I had at the start of _every_ LAN party.

Once I also accidentally turned off a handful of PCs when I had to leave a party early, because I didn't notice my multiple socket outlet was powering several other PCs.

It's a pity that kids these days grow up without LAN parties.

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