181–190 of 267 posts
> 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.
Virtual CloneDrive is extremely under-appreciated both then and now. Most retro hobbyists use an ancient version of DaemonTools instead
What did I expect? The "warez = trojan" thing is mainly corporate propaganda. Commercial products are just as likely to contain malware.
> Alcohol 120% was the free tool of choice to emulate a CD drive for ISOs of games which required the CD to be inserted for copy protection, or rip a CD for that purpose. This only became popular once hard drives became big enough for people to spend many gigabytes imaging their CDs.
Actually, it was Daemon Tools :^)
> There were websites which aggregated downloads of keygens for various games. These worked more often than you would expect. What did I expect? The "warez = trojan" thing is mainly corporate propaganda. Commercial products are just as likely to contain malware. > Alcohol 120% was the free tool of choice to emulate a CD drive for ISOs of games which required the CD to be inserted for copy protection, or rip a CD for…
Except that with warez you can get malwares from both the original program AND the crack itself.
> The cool kids had a Barton Athlon XP 2500+ and a Radeon 9600. The rich kids had a 9800. This made me chuckle. For my computer I went though a bunch of local computer stores, going through all their CPU boxes and got lucky on the second day. There it was, an Athlon XP with AQZFA stepping. Overclocked twice as fast as the other models, and the coolest of CPUs in that generation. Overclocking of an AQZFA Athlon XP was…
That line made me chuckle too. I used a Duron 1.2 with a all in wonder 9600 XT, then got an XP 2500+, which I almost immediately OC'ed to 3200+.
In the end, I don’t think I really learned all that much. (The solution was often to just backup what we could of a person’s storage and reformat.) But my friends and I had a good time at this shop, run by two computer geeks of an older generation, that was probably just a few years shy of being wiped out by the Geek Squad and Genius Bar.
Apart from that, my school district had a kind of magnet career skills center that offered a network administration course. On Fridays the instructor would let all of us in class play Counterstrike on the classroom’s LAN. I think that was put a stop to, however, after a district supervisor came into the room just as a student gleefully yelled, “Headshot!”
My 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…
We did have a DHCP server - my old Macintosh Centris 660AV running IPNetRouter. It was even routing a 56K dialup connection (that went down whenever someone ordered a pizza) which was completely useless.
My 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 w…
That's a part of LANParties that seems to be forgotten, and even here as I read all the replies. Sure, it was about games and file-sharing, but it was as much about "hey you see what this dude did to skin his Windows?" or "wait was this transfer really that fast?" or "did you hear what this guy just did?" little legends that developed in the time we had together and made us ache to come back better and have the cool stuff everyone would be talking about next time.
Before Google had all the answers, before all the hardware was centralized into a dozen corporations, before there was an index of tools and their purpose... we had each other, and that was pretty cool.
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…