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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, why would you want to do that? I still have my 9800 :)
I think they were trying to modify their 9600 to think it was a 9800.
Are there any LAN parties happening these days on regular basis? How does one become part of that group?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
I remember the same issues but don't know why we had to enable IPX/SPX over TCP/IP. I have a specific memory of troubleshooting for an hour and then clicked IPS/SPX and StarCraft worked. Does anyone remember a specific reason why? I was too young to know or care.
Going to quakecon and meeting John Carmack was a top life experience for me
> 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 problem…
How we had it (rural Norway, late 90s/early 00s)
- Some guys would show up and spend 10% of the time on gaming, and like 90% on coding. They'd mainly be at LAN-parties to collect tools and meet other coders. Sometimes they'd show some cool demos they worked on, or some game they were working on
- Shared folders of music, films, and pictures would get copied an masse. A LOT of the pictures were definitely not for the public eye.
- Some LAN-parties would drag on for weeks, and kind of just become LAN-clubs. People would practically live there...I remember a friend hosted one of the last LAN-parties right around the time World of Warcraft got released, and while it was meant to just last for a weekend, 5-6 guys ended up staying there for a solid month, gaming WoW since the host had high-speed internet. Owner didn't mind, as he was equally hooked on the game.
- The older games would only play Age of Empires, and not much else. The competitive gamers would grind StarCraft, and later on CS.
- Playing all the pre 1.6 CS versions was a fun time. They seemed to change quite a bit between each update, until 1.6 became the standard.
- If we encountered some networking problems, someone always knew a 40-year old networking dude that would gladly show up and fix whatever was needed. Same dudes would always have tons of spare parts lying around.
- Right around the time CS 1.6 became popular, we started seeing the first "pro" gaming e-sports teams. Back then, these teams would just play at LAN parties, and then go compete in larger regional LAN parties. The prizes were laughable compared to the modern ones...one clan I knew won like $5000, which was split on 5-6 members? Those guys decided to drop out of school and pursue CS full-time, which lasted around 6 months or so.
- We would have a national LAN party in Hamar (The Gathering), and traveling there from all the way north was a real bitch. Imagine bringing a full-tower case and 19" CRT onboard the plane. Even though the first flat-screens sucked, it was infinitely easier/more practical than those CRT screens.
And lots of other things.
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…
net send! I once accidentally messaged every computer in my high school "fck y" with that powerful little tool.
Net effect: Hold down enter and full your target's screen with a hundreds of windows faster than they could clear them.
We called it bombing, so we usually just wrote the word "bomb" when doing it.
The one time I was ever really disciplined in school was after I accidentally targeted a service account instead of my friend's account. Every screen in the school was filled with the word bomb and my username was on each window title.