I remember every lan party there would be someone that would have issues with his PC, that being network or Windows and could not play at all.
this!
Memories from old LAN parties
61–70 of 267 posts
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#62> The cool kids had a Barton Athlon XP 2500+ and a Radeon 9600. The rich kids had a 9800.
I still remember trying to flash my 9600 bios to a 9800 because some were able to that. Unfortunately I didn’t have one of the lucky models that could do so.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#63If you are found using a wallhack, you will be duct taped to your chair for the remainder of the LAN.
Buy the latest most expensive graphics card and return it after the LAN, but this trick only works a couple times before the computer store will only return your money by check after 3 months.
Real Lan Parties(TM) bring their own electrical distribution boxes to avoid surges in the commercial building's existing setup.
Don't leech the giant shared network drive while the kindly soul providing it is trying to frag.
The hottest girlfriend there is being ignored the entire time by the weird dweeb boyfriend who just wants to talk StarCraft.
There is a pecking order of games, and without question the most hardcore players are the gods of Rocket Arena 3, followed closely by anyone who is so good at Counter-Strike that it's impossible to tell if they're cheating. (they are.)
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#64>A LAN isn’t legitimate unless at least one person has to reinstall Windows along the way. Never a truer phrase spoken.
A buddy of ours has the nickname gremlin to this day. If he touched your PC it was guaranteed to bsod or just die. he spent lan parties trying to get his PC working, reinstalling windows...etc
We had a friend like that too, actually. We all made some mumbling explanation about "electrostatic discharge" so that we felt less uncomfortable being so superstitious, but yeah people would leap in front of him to avoid him touching their stuff. But yeah, he was one of the crew, so it's not like we were gonna not-invite-him.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#65Token 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 content for the monster AI and the campaign levels and stuff, so that I could make a zip that fit on 4 1.44 floppies, carry it in my pocket, install it on demand on computers on the Cap labs (I wasn't larcenous/brave enough to compromise the network share like some other people).
(PS: if anyone recognizes me from that much information, get in touch)
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#66So 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 quickly realized that we could use this to make friends in the broader community, so we bought a bunch of LCD monitors and pelican cases, and began to take our setup on the road to Flash conferences. During the day we would hang out at the conference, learn new programing / visual techniques and generally see super cool Flash stuff, and at night we would invite everyone over to our hotel room and then play Halo all night. We made so many friends and close contacts in the community through this, and it really help us meet a lot of people, and build strong, personal relationships.
I remember we were on a 6 week bus tour in North America doing events for Adobe AIR, and making a detour to NYC for the Halo 3 launch at at Best Buy. We then played on the bus all night long.
Here is a clip of me walking to the launch, so happy and singing about it being my Halo birthday (whatever that means!).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVQKgui28O8
So many good times.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#67I 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.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#68I've only done a few LAN parties in the last handful of years, and they weren't quite as magical as doing it as a teenager where you spend 75% of the time deciding on what to play and then figuring out how to crack it so everyone can play.
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".
Totally. Getting everything to work was so rewarding. The actual playing of the games was icing on the cake
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#69> The cool kids had a Barton Athlon XP 2500+ and a Radeon 9600. The rich kids had a 9800.
This made me chuckle. For my computer I went though a bunch of local computer stores, going through all their CPU boxes and got lucky on the second day. There it was, an Athlon XP with AQZFA stepping. Overclocked twice as fast as the other models, and the coolest of CPUs in that generation.
Overclocking of an AQZFA Athlon XP was as easy as using a pencil to draw a line in between the two right pins. The mods I've seen on LANs to cool this thing were something else. From custom-built PLC radiators to water cooling setups, which were the new hot stuff at the time.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#70> 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…
Even after a half dozen lan parties, my group of friends could never figure out how to get windows file sharing working reliably. Eventually I set up an http server so people could download patches and stuff. Worked great. I put a sign on the wall with my IP address, 10.1.1.32.