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Memories from old LAN parties

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Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#141

Post by Rnonymous »

eerikkivistik wrote: post #113

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.

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?

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#142

Post by tinco »

eerikkivistik wrote: post #113

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.

The most well known (and I think long lived) LAN in The Netherlands is Campzone, where the LAN is on a camping and people being their tents and caravans as well as their PC's in the middle of the summer. I always wanted to go as a kid, but could never make it work with my parents. I bet there's multiple people here who are gonna comment how cool it was and possibly still is.

edit: Just checked their website and it looks like they tried to reboot it after COVID but the tickets got too expensive and they couldn't get enough people.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#143

Post by eerikkivistik »

Rnonymous wrote: post #141
eerikkivistik wrote: post #113

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.

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 Civilization or Heroes of Might and Magic 3. If you have enough people, I also recommend Enemy Territory (2003 version) with some mods, its awesome. But you need at least 20 people for this. Just for laughs, if we end up with a tie, our tiebreaker is Liero behind a single keyboard.

Edit: Oh, forgot about Age of Empires 2, Rise of Nations. But if you want a good Lan-only experience you kind of have to use cracked versions of old games. I make up for this morally by buying a newer version if there is one even available, then use a cracked old version for playing.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#144

Post by eerikkivistik »

tinco wrote: post #142
eerikkivistik wrote: post #113

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.

The most well known (and I think long lived) LAN in The Netherlands is Campzone, where the LAN is on a camping and people being their tents and caravans as well as their PC's in the middle of the summer. I always wanted to go as a kid, but could never make it work with my parents. I bet there's multiple people here who are gonna comment how cool it was and possibly still is. edit: Just checked their website and it lo…

It's a pretty fun read on Wikipedia. Honestly I had no idea, there were other people doing something similar. Well, somewhat similar. We take a 2 hour break and shut down the computers in case a thunderstorm is passing overhead :D.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#145

Post by thefz »

> Alcohol 120% was the free tool of choice to emulate a CD drive for ISOs of games which required the CD to be inserted

Wasn't that Virtual Clone drive? As far as I remember Alcohol was for burning ISOs.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#146

Post by mjevans »

wielebny wrote: post #125
nottheengineer wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft does something cool for once and it's an accident?

It's neither an accident nor planned mechanism. It had nothing to do with network, the transmission wasn't switching to multicast. Probably the author observed that reading different files from disk simultaneously was slower, until the copy process catches up to read the same files.

Seek time on mechanical hard drives sucks, and was much worse back in the prime LAN party days.

System RAM or Drive cache REALLY helped, so yes, the lagging copy would drag down the leading one until they both caught to within that buffer and things zipped along.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#147

Post by raffraffraff »

JohnBooty wrote: post #75
CableNinja wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found these Coolermaster straps that enabled you to carry your CRT and tower with a handle. SO SO SO useful for lan parties.

The relatively poor man's version: the indestructable yellow or blue IKEA bag I forget if they actually sold the blue ones back then. I remember taking a few yellow ones (that weren't supposed to leave the store)

We didn't have IKEA in Ireland until 2007 (and that was Belfast, I didn't have one near me for another 2 years)... LONG after my LAN days were done.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#148

Post by bombcar »

thefz wrote: post #145

> Alcohol 120% was the free tool of choice to emulate a CD drive for ISOs of games which required the CD to be inserted Wasn't that Virtual Clone drive? As far as I remember Alcohol was for burning ISOs.

If I remember correctly you had to rip the ISO with one program and load it with another. CloneCD was involved.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#149

Post by paint »

eerikkivistik wrote: post #143
Rnonymous wrote: post #141

Earlier 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…

Blobby Volley is the only true tiebreaker! (Also good for passing time while games were installing from disc)

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#150

Post by bombcar »

CableNinja wrote: post #37
Veliladon wrote: post #24

>A LAN isn’t legitimate unless at least one person has to reinstall Windows along the way. Never a truer phrase spoken.

Still dont know how it managed to work, but my buddy had an XP box that he was gonna use for our lan party, but it went sideways. The only thing i had was a win 2k cd. We repaired using the 2k cd, got the system up, in a really fubar hybrid mode, where parts of the system acted like XP, and other parts acted like 2k

The dirty secret was windows XP was just a skinned Win2k and the components were very similar.

I remember resisting XP for awhile and instead editing INF files so drivers would install on 2k for me.

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