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Memories from old LAN parties

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Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#81

Post by amatecha »

scelerat wrote: post #52

I did LAN parties in the early '90s when a bunch of BBS nerds would show up at a local pizza joint cradling Mac LCs, IIsi's, and Powerbooks, bust out some PhoneNet connectors and play some intense Bolo [0] or Spaceward Ho [1] games. Later, Spectre [2], Marathon [3] Maybe someone would demo some app they were working on in MPW or Think C, or demo a funny postage stamp-sized quicktime (new video format) of an exploding…

That sounds like an amazing time. I sunk a ton of hours into networked Bolo, Spectre and Marathon... probably not quite to the scale that you experienced! I often tell people how the game mechanics in Marathon are still present in basically all multiplayer FPSes today- the "Post-Game Carnage Report" exceeds what you even get in many games today, for that matter.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#82

Post by amatecha »

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…

oh heck yeah, I actually had my own web hosting in those days and kept a zip file of a complete quake 1 install so I could run the game on any machine that had net access :) fun times!!

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#85

Post by eru »

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…

When did you sleep?

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#86

Post by totallywrong »

pluc wrote: post #9

I 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…

> 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.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#87

Post by eru »

JohnBooty wrote: post #80
zerbinxx wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love the story. Would also love the story of how normally non-druggie nerds get amphetamnines in the pre-adderal era.

I dunno, I think Adderall was pretty easily available back then our crew never really did illegal or prescription drugs But we'd drink booze and/or achieve Adderall-like effects with caffeinated energy drinks. None of us drank coffee so we had like... zero caffeine tolerance. If you have zero caffeine tolerance and you slam multiple energy drinks the effect is NOT subtle of course, TODAY, my ruined body is so immune…

> of course, TODAY, my ruined body is so immune to caffeine I can chug coffee directly before a satisfying REM nap lol

Going on a tangent: it takes a while for the caffeine you drink to make it through your digestive system, so even for someone without any tolerance at all, they could take a few shots of espresso on a full stomach and then have about a 30 minute window to have a nap, before the jitter starts.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#88

Post by sunnybeetroot »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #55
pvorb wrote: post #20

> 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…

It's 2011. You have 8 Steam accounts with Civilization V. Coronas are coming out the fridge. It's 4:30pm. Someone shows up with a macOS device. The first turn began at 8:05pm. You know the deadline is at 3am, because that's when they do last call at the Korean BBQ place that one of the guys looks forward to all night. There's only diplomacy rule: "No alien governors," you can't just walk over to some amateur's screen…

Thank you for the reminder of the French halo leak. Amazing memory.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#89

Post by eru »

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.

Isn't it mostly the AAA games that lack LAN support? I wouldn't call them the only things worth playing, just the opposite.

Btw, most of the 90s are about 30 years away now. So you could play games from the 2000s, too, even if nothing from the last decade works in a LAN.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#90

Post by jclulow »

efxhoy wrote: post #5

> If you’re using a 10 Mbit hub and copy the same directory to two Windows SMB hosts simultaneously it is somehow smart enough to make the transfers coincide so it can transmit the same data to both at once. To this day I have no idea what heuristic it used but honest to god, it slowed down the earlier transfer and then went in lockstep file by file for the remainder. That is really cool.

I think it was more likely an emergent effect of rubbish file system and disk cache behaviour, little or no prefetching, etc, than any coordinated activity in SMB?
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