121–130 of 267 posts
Me and some friends host a pretty weird event, the name of which loosely translates to "Field Lan". We set up tents, generators and an antenna in the middle of a field in Estonia and compete in various games for 72 hours straight on an open field in fresh air. We sleep in tents. Its a private event once a year, but we have 30 - 50 people there every year. Next year is the 10th year we do this.
I went to LAN party where everyone had lugged their CRTs, except one kid who had a 15” TFT LCD screen, which were super rare and expensive at the time. It had a huge crack right down the center, but was still just about usable. I asked him how that happened. He said he was playing online (Counterstrike I think?) and lost a match, causing him to punch the screen in frustration. That screen must have cost >$1000 at the…
>A LAN isn’t legitimate unless at least one person has to reinstall Windows along the way. Never a truer phrase spoken.
A lot of drama with graphic card drivers as well (for the people too poor to have a 3dfx). Also managing to have everyone on the same patch for $GAME could waste hours.
This one hits close to home.
IIRC, in some games it was not even that obvious that someone had a different version (e.g. maybe they just wouldn't be able to see the server in the list), which made everything take even more time.
That just reminded me that circa 2010 I created a Google Sheet with a list of all the games we used to play, which patches to download and from where. By that time it was getting quite hard to find some patches to older games.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it was more likely an emergent effect of rubbish file system and disk cache behaviour, little or no prefetching, etc, than any coordinated activity in SMB?
Microsoft does something cool for once and it's an accident?
Probably the author observed that reading different files from disk simultaneously was slower, until the copy process catches up to read the same files.
I went to LAN party where everyone had lugged their CRTs, except one kid who had a 15” TFT LCD screen, which were super rare and expensive at the time. It had a huge crack right down the center, but was still just about usable. I asked him how that happened. He said he was playing online (Counterstrike I think?) and lost a match, causing him to punch the screen in frustration. That screen must have cost >$1000 at the…
Me and some friends host a pretty weird event, the name of which loosely translates to "Field Lan". We set up tents, generators and an antenna in the middle of a field in Estonia and compete in various games for 72 hours straight on an open field in fresh air. We sleep in tents. Its a private event once a year, but we have 30 - 50 people there every year. Next year is the 10th year we do this.
That sounds amazing!
I went to LAN party where everyone had lugged their CRTs, except one kid who had a 15” TFT LCD screen, which were super rare and expensive at the time. It had a huge crack right down the center, but was still just about usable. I asked him how that happened. He said he was playing online (Counterstrike I think?) and lost a match, causing him to punch the screen in frustration. That screen must have cost >$1000 at the…
Haha, I had a 17" TFT in 2000. Was at a 600 people LAN and only one other dude had one.
So many found memories of Red Alert 2 and Quake 2 playing at lan parties in the 90s. I was lucky enough in the early 2000's where I could use my love of video games and lan parties as part of my job. I was responsible for the Flash community at Macromedia, and we would set up 4 xboxes with split screen for 8 player Halo 2 and 3 tournaments in conference rooms (which has multiple plasma screens already set up). I quic…
Later on, there was a tool enabling "virtual LAN" and you can play against players online, over the internet.
And random people beat the shit out of me. Then I just realized that I actually knew like 10% of the game machanism even after hundreds of LAN matches. That was where I stopped playing.
very familiar points except the part about stealing hard drives. Totally unthinkable scenario. You just don't ever, EVER, touch another persons computer without them inviting you in for help, or some kind of showoff. Atleast one of your boys would look after your computer while you were afk. Someone would always be there
Author here. The victim was a mate of mine and we were just as shocked. No idea how the perp got away with it let alone had the audacity to try. It was so bizarre I had to include it.