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Memories from old LAN parties

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Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#261

Post by ogurechny »

jholman wrote: post #65
ohadpr wrote: post #56

Token ring coax cabling with a terminator at the end DOS, Windows Quake 3 arena, Descent, Warcraft 2, Unreal Tournament 94-98

Threewave CTF for Quake 1. I can still remember Marek Dubcek (I'm probably spelling his name wrong) bragging about his performance at Duke3d or Q1, and thinking "fuck him, he's too good-looking to be better than me at a video game", and learning to use mouselook back when you had to handwrite your own config file to use mouselook without holding down Shift. I took the WAD files for Q1 apart, ripped out all the conten…

Minimal setup for playing q2dm1 is 8 MB compressed. Less if there's only a single player model without skins, but we can allow ourselves to be posh. Made the WinRAR-based installer, cut into floppy-sized volumes, wrote a convenient batch file (with optional dialogs and help screen) to automate copying sets of files to a pack of floppies. Not all computers in school had CD-ROM drives anyway, but they were fast enough, and all had network.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#262

Post by ogurechny »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #233

> If you don’t have enough warez to reach the minimum share limit for the DC++ server you can always add the directories for your games installed under Program Files. Not sure if it only started in the Windows XP days, but it's a bad idea to put games in that folder, one of the reasons being that they might not work unless you give them admin access, for instance to be able to write user files in their own folders (a…

The joke is that uneducated users routinely shared whole drives or system directories, including personal files and configuration data with passwords, but it could also be used as a trick if you didn't have a big drive, or anything more valid to share.

As for file access, I doubt that many people have used non-administrator accounts on their own home computers. It was recognized when UAC was added to distinguish “real administrative tasks” for the administrator. TrustedInstaller limiting and 32-bit/64-bit virtualization divide happened later.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#263

Post by donatj »

raincole wrote: post #129
mesh wrote: 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…

I remember I played a fighting game (a local one without English version) at LAN parties. It was very fun. My friends were all about the same skill level so fights were even. Later on, there was a tool enabling "virtual LAN" and you can play against players online, over the internet. And random people beat the shit out of me. Then I just realized that I actually knew like 10% of the game machanism even after hundreds…

This was my general experience with first person shooters. I was almost always first among my friends. Then Xbox Live came around and turned out I'm pretty bad at first person shooters.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#264

Post by donatj »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #49
julianlam wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I also remember the networking problems I had at the start of _every_ LAN party. Oh of course. It wasn't a LAN party until you spent hours fiddling with networking settings that you could make heads or tails of, just so computers could talk to each other. Then Hamachi came along :)

Oh man, Hamachi somehow felt like borderline malware (I guess being owned by LogMeIn does that to you). But hey, it allowed your friend who had a good rig but didn’t know the first thing about networking to host a Minecraft server. :)

It was good before the LogMeIn acquisition. I think most people promptly stopped using it when that happened.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#265

Post by bendoidic »

I remember my earliest LAN game was the first Warcraft RTS, mainly because slower school computers could still run it and it allowed for "spawn installs". I got to experience real LAN gaming later in the 90s because I traveled to Europe. Sure, my friends in the US would play Tribes, Descent, and Quake, but we never had a room full of powerful enough computers to play it on a LAN.

When I got back to the states, I was hooked. I built my first PC (a Pentium III with an ATI RAGE 128, I believe). I must have been 14. A few years later, I made a video* about the LAN parties. It's a good time capsule of the experience.

* (Two parts because back then YT limited uploads to 10 mins) Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZVrZRgVGrs, Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3-_N3kwMqQ

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#266

Post by Tijdreiziger »

donatj wrote: post #264
Tijdreiziger wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, Hamachi somehow felt like borderline malware (I guess being owned by LogMeIn does that to you). But hey, it allowed your friend who had a good rig but didn’t know the first thing about networking to host a Minecraft server. :)

It was good before the LogMeIn acquisition. I think most people promptly stopped using it when that happened.

Around 10 years ago, I think there weren’t any other popular options despite its shadiness (well, either that or we didn’t know any better as teenagers). Of course nowadays, there are multiple good options.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#267

Post by jewel »

nottheengineer wrote: post #234
wielebny wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Im that case, how does one transfer catch up to the next one? Shouldn't the seek time from switching files have the same impact on both and keep the first one in the lead?

The disk cache is what lets the second one catch up. It would only happen if the copies were started at nearly the same time; soon enough that what's been copied so far is still in the cache.

I've observed this same behavior on modern operating systems with big rsync jobs and spinning drives. If you have lots of small files then reading the metadata and directory structure takes a while but fits in the cache, so a second rsync will catch up very quickly to the first.

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