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A Lament for the LAN Party

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Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#31

Post by partisan »

cptskippy wrote: post #14
mey wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will admit I have rigged up Tribes 1 over a null modem cable back in the day for local lan play.

The first time I played Quake multiplayer was over modem with my neighbor. His dad had one of those USRobotics V.everything modems and I had a USR Sportster 28k. They negotiated some proprietary protocol like v42 because we had a 140k connect. It was insane at the time.

I vaguely recall that there was a "shotgun" set of modems you could pair up and get 128k over two 56k connections. I had just the one, but it felt so, so good to get sub-200 ping in Action Quake 2 and CS.

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#32

Post by [deleted] »

ModernMech wrote: post #22

LAN parties were an interesting normative force at my high school. You always hear about the tension between jocks and geeks. But jocks like playing video games as much as geeks, who had the technical know-how to get networked games going. So the jocks at my high school were really interested in being friends with us nerds. We finally had something in common! Our LAN parties were this strange alternate universe where…

[deleted]

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#33

Post by LukeShu »

tracker1 wrote: post #17
Bromskloss wrote: post #7

> The LAN party, where you and six mates cram yourself into a dining room for a weekend, hook up your PCs with a complex series of switches, routers and CAT9 cables, somehow became quite the thing. What is a CAT9 cable?

No idea, I remember playing around with 10-base-t coax a few times...

To clarify vt240's reply: If you were playing with coax, that would have been 10base-2. 10base-T is twisted pair Cat3 cable that used the same 8P8C connectors we use today.

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#34

Post by atonse »

NeutronBoy wrote: post #28
NeutronBoy wrote: post #18

Probably about 4 times per year on a long weekend, my mates and I still get together in someone's warehouse or garage and have a 3 day LAN. There's normally between 15-20 people, and we play a mix of CS:Source, Warcraft 3 custom maps, AoE, Dota 2, and whatever else the fashion is at the time. A recent one has been Spintires, which is a blast with 4 people! That said, the amount of sleep and the quality of the food we…

Also, the advent of broadband and routers now mean networking is literally plug and play, not spending 2-3 hours trying to either set up a DHCP server, or assign static IPs and trying to figure out why it's not working, only to find out that someone mistyped it.

I remember buying a networking kit at Best Buy in the late 90s and then with 3 of my friends spending hours just trying to get the computers to ping each other.

There was also always someone who would have to reformat and reinstall Windows.

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#35

Post by camperman »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #26

Anybody remember Snipes on the old Novell LANs?

Yes! The first company foolish enough to employ me as a junior dev would have Snipes games on Friday afternoons between anyone who wasn't fielding a customer support call.

Sometimes I would be on the phone to someone while navigating around the maze trying to bounce a few stars round the corners at people - and then have to explain what the screams were in the background.

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#36

Post by other_herbert »

atonse wrote: post #34
NeutronBoy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the advent of broadband and routers now mean networking is literally plug and play, not spending 2-3 hours trying to either set up a DHCP server, or assign static IPs and trying to figure out why it's not working, only to find out that someone mistyped it.

I remember buying a networking kit at Best Buy in the late 90s and then with 3 of my friends spending hours just trying to get the computers to ping each other. There was also always someone who would have to reformat and reinstall Windows.

I laughed hard at this... The one poor guy who had family computer and required a large amount of work to be playable....

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#37

Post by camperman »

partisan wrote: post #31
cptskippy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time I played Quake multiplayer was over modem with my neighbor. His dad had one of those USRobotics V.everything modems and I had a USR Sportster 28k. They negotiated some proprietary protocol like v42 because we had a 140k connect. It was insane at the time.

I vaguely recall that there was a "shotgun" set of modems you could pair up and get 128k over two 56k connections. I had just the one, but it felt so, so good to get sub-200 ping in Action Quake 2 and CS.

I remember a trick of connecting at a standard speed and then running a certain AT command that reduced the latency considerably - from 250ms down to 180 or so. Can't remember what it was but it made a very big difference to Quakeworld. The client prediction made it very playable on a sub-200 ping.

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#38

Post by femto »

NeutronBoy wrote: post #28
NeutronBoy wrote: post #18

Probably about 4 times per year on a long weekend, my mates and I still get together in someone's warehouse or garage and have a 3 day LAN. There's normally between 15-20 people, and we play a mix of CS:Source, Warcraft 3 custom maps, AoE, Dota 2, and whatever else the fashion is at the time. A recent one has been Spintires, which is a blast with 4 people! That said, the amount of sleep and the quality of the food we…

Also, the advent of broadband and routers now mean networking is literally plug and play, not spending 2-3 hours trying to either set up a DHCP server, or assign static IPs and trying to figure out why it's not working, only to find out that someone mistyped it.

When Wolfenstein 3D (or was it Doom?) came out, I spent a month writing a socket library for DECnet, so we could play the game in network mode at a defence lab in which I was working. We had some great times, as in 1992 (1993?) it was uncommon to have a high speed connection between that many computers. Never did get around to releasing that winsock driver (no sourceforge then), which is a pity, as it may well have predated DEC's own socket implementation.

---

edit: winsock -> socket, as it was actually written for DOS, before winsock.

Futher edit: Thinking about it, the game might have been Doom and the year 1993, as I don't think Wolfenstein 3D had a multiplayer mode

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#39

Post by DanielBMarkham »

beggi wrote: post #30
ModernMech wrote: post #22

LAN parties were an interesting normative force at my high school. You always hear about the tension between jocks and geeks. But jocks like playing video games as much as geeks, who had the technical know-how to get networked games going. So the jocks at my high school were really interested in being friends with us nerds. We finally had something in common! Our LAN parties were this strange alternate universe where…

Call me crazy but as I understand it from kids today it's pretty cool to be a "nerd" today

The word "nerd" is so overused that a supermodel who likes Dickens considers herself a nerd.

It's really not the word it used to be.

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#40

Post by bpchaps »

Shameless plug.

Can't speak too much for it just yet (working through sponsorships, etc), but some friends and I are setting up a 160p LAN in Chicago later this year. It's particularly neat since we're not the only ones to have similar goals. LANs are coming back ;).

We also do ~monthly LANs out in Wauconda (Chicago suburbs) area if anybody's interested.

Here's just some preliminary stuff we've been working on. The switch we have is the same as LHC's: http://imgur.com/a/BICDK

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