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Memories from old LAN parties

thomask.sdf.org

241–250 of 267 posts

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#241

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?

Hell even online multiplayer games are waning, there's just nothing good anymore that isn't "free to play" and every game is desperately trying to create its own ecosystem to "make it big".

The last decent one I played was among us, and that was only during the pandemic. Simple gameplay, no dlc, accounts, microtransactions (at that point at least).

Now when I have people over we just break out a ps1/xbox/360...

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#242
post #39
post #38

It was a 90s and we met through our BBS systems. there was no debate what to play, doom. Warcraft came soon after. The Internet sounded cool, too bad actually kind of destroyed everything. some of us had pagers. we made plans, over land lines, and everyone actually showed up. we didn’t take photos because that would be stupid. our parents would find out what we were doing. which was mostly drinking and smoking way to…

also, we didn’t get bored of it. we figured out how to make custom maps. yes including our school, and picked appropriate demon for each classroom to represent our fabulous teachers. Columbine hadn’t happened yet. even if someone found out, you weren’t gonna go to jail. Things went downhill fast after that.

Tbf I think it was quite common, because our friend group did the same (in NZ, where we have only ever had 1 school shooting, ever).

It definitely has something do with: * We spent a lot of time there (every day for school) * We were intensely familiar with the spaces

It would be interesting to research the psychological reasons why making a space like that as a map is so appealing!

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#243
post #40
post #13

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.

At mine, we had Warcraft 3 installed on the macs in my programming class. The greybeard teacher didn't really care, but his TAs would fuck with us because they were upper classmen. So they'd uninstall it. We had admin creds, though, so screw you Jordan and Phil. Anyway, we played a lot of Warcraft 3.

Our teacher actually gave us the keys, because he knew our "type" (ie the same kinda geek as him). We'd play cS1.6 etc (almost) every lunchtime, it was great.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#244
post #235

Best party I ever attended had someones girlfriend jump onto the table in only brah and thong and yelling at her boyfriend "just stop that and ... me already!" and he looked up "I will but we're in a match right now", my 15 year old mind was blown away on multiple levels. I also met my to this day best friend there, we still laugh about the girlfriend episode once every while to this day.

Bit boom houm though

Wasn't really humor, just an experience I had that made a lasting impression on my young self.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that annoying Windows service that let you send pop-up messages to any IP Winpopup. I loved that tool, showed it to my entire class in school so we could comfortably cheat during exams. I was hailed as a super hacker with mad skills.

I thought it was called netsend or something. I recall somehow accidentally sending a message to everyone on our school network.

winpopup was a GUI interface, `net send` was the CLI command (with which you could indeed message an entire domain)

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#246
post #66

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…

If you want to revive your memories of Red Alert 2, some people ported the game in the web[1]. The online multiplayer feature works fairly well.

[1]: https://chronodivide.com/

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#247
post #167

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.

So thats still a local network or just normal internet?

Both really. We mostly play on lan, but if people want to they can play online with decent latency. All competition still happens in lan.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it was more like: XP was Win2K with added DirectX and the skins.

And yes, they started as the same kernel and drivers.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#249
post #119

Irrespectively of the number of participants, there will only be a maximum of 1 terminators available for the BNC network. It will take years until you can use Ethernet at a LAN party, because of the one poor guy who can't afford to upgrade from BNC. There is always that one pr0n addict who watches it the whole weekend. Everyone says they won't sleep the entire weekend, but at the first night all but one person are s…

> Irrespectively of the number of participants, there will only be a maximum of 1 terminators available for the BNC network. Haha, so true! It reminds me of a LAN party we had at a friend's house. We had a bag of spare parts but, of course, the guy bringing the bag was late. This was around 1992 or so, thus before mobile phones and nobody knew anything. Our host (the pr0n guy, but instead of watching porn he liked to…

That's very impressive. Even with so many spare parts there were always a dud cable in the mix somewhere or someone's computer refusing to recognize the network for some reason.

It usually took a few hours just to set up and get everyone working, then the sharing and copying would start.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#250
post #66

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…

If you want to revive your memories of Red Alert 2, some people ported the game in the web[1]. The online multiplayer feature works fairly well. [1]: https://chronodivide.com/

Or OpenRA for the first game
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