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Memories from old LAN parties

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Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#251

Post by BlueTemplar »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #159
roel_v wrote: post #152

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…

Now we have something even simpler than HDD trays : HDD duplicators that don't even need to be connected to a PC, where you place the (naked !) HDDs vertically.

They can also be used as USB HDD hubs, but since the copy button is unprotected, I'm always paranoid to only have one drive in it at once...

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#252

Post by BlueTemplar »

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)

Might as well get the metal trolley to go with that bag then. And their elastic band + hooks to hold stuff inside.

I use these regularly for big groceries, even the bag itself lasts years when the usual flimsy mostly plastic trolleys tend to break after half a year.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#253

Post by BlueTemplar »

vocatus_gate wrote: post #224
luzer7 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For a while, before TCP/IP really became "the" network protocol, IPX/SPX was also around and a lot of games used it. Red Alert 2, Descent 1 & 2, etc all used IPX/SPX.

Yeah, setting up IPX circa 2010 to play Dungeon Keeper 1 in multiplayer 15 years late was quite the puzzle ! Especially since I didn't have admin access to those computers... at first.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#254

Post by BlueTemplar »

nvy wrote: post #10
thesnide wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 90s retroLAN would be great... Playing 90s games, that are rather cheap nowadays.

Probably one of the more viable options because just about anything worth playing in the last 10+ years doesn't have LAN support.

Early 90s games LAN support is worse, between only hotseat multiplayer and other protocols than IP...

As for recent games that do not have normal IP support, better to ignore them.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#255

Post by efxhoy »

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.

Ah yes that makes sense. It’s easy to forget how slow HDDs used to be and their mechanical nature of spinning disk and a head.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#256

Post by to-too-two »

Some of my fondest memories are LAN parties. We used to play all sorts of games, some of the usual suspects like Counter-Strike, Age of Empires II, etc, but my favorite is when we did 3v3 DotA.

We had three people in one room on a team, and the opposing team in another room. The winning team would walk into the room after the match to talk about the highlights, but the losing team would say "Nope, get out, let's run it back!"

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#257

Post by msm_ »

Yournothed wrote: post #182

> 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…

>What did I expect? The "warez = trojan" thing is mainly corporate propaganda. Commercial products are just as likely to contain malware.

How do you define "malware"? I'm quite sure most commercial products don't contain embedded trojans that steal your browsers passwords, join a spamming operation or encrypt your disk. For pirated software it absolutely does happen (one easy way to start a botnet is to upload something like "BaldursGate3Installer.exe" and wait for careless gamers).

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#258

Post by beacham »

I worked at Chick-Fil-A for a year or so in high school. One of the ones in a free standing building in the middle of a parking lot of a much larger shopping center- bordering the interstate. A group of 6-7 of us, INCLUDING the General Manager, were big gamers.

At the time, Call of Duty releases were all the rage. The night of the Modern Warfare 2 release, we all closed up at 10pm, invited a few of our friends, and brought in our monitors (mostly 40inch TVs) and Xboxes. We set them all up on the Chick-Fil-A tables and booths and made several batches of Chick-fil-A nuggets and fries. We played 6v6 from about 11:00pm - 4:00am.

I remember thinking how ridiculous it must have looked from the interstate to see a Chick-Fil-A lit up with 12 screens inside through those translucent shades at 2:00 in the morning on a weekday.

That is one of the greater memories of my childhood. It delights me just to think about it!

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#259

Post by Shorel »

vocatus_gate wrote: post #225
ronnier wrote: post #192

Going to quakecon and meeting John Carmack was a top life experience for me

He replied to a tweet of mine and I still have it bookmarked and screenshotted to this day. My GF didn't understand why I was so excited

Printed and framed, right?

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#260

Post by ogurechny »

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

Ah, yes, the manual repairs in the primitive recovery console. Look for .SYS and .DLL files with suspicious dates (unlike the others), overwrite them with EXPAND'ed originals from the setup disk, try booting the system. Had to do it recently on an old XP system after testing early 2000s tool that had no idea service packs existed, and “updated” system files.
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