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Memories from old LAN parties

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Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#91

Post by mndgs »

dade_ wrote: post #38

It was a 90s and we met through our BBS systems. there was no debate what to play, doom. Warcraft came soon after. The Internet sounded cool, too bad actually kind of destroyed everything. some of us had pagers. we made plans, over land lines, and everyone actually showed up. we didn’t take photos because that would be stupid. our parents would find out what we were doing. which was mostly drinking and smoking way to…

Yes, Doom! I am reading this and I think to myself: nobody here was kid/teenager in 90s?

It was Doom on 8-10 school computer network PCs for me, absolutely fantastic times!

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#92

Post by ctippett »

I remember being terrified of applying my aftermarket Thermaltake cooler on my Athlon XP, so I waited until I went to a local LAN so I could get someone more experienced than me to install it.

To this day I still get anxious applying CPU coolers, even though they're a lot easier to install. Thanks anonymous person from Auckland's LAN at Upper Harbour stadium (I can't remember the name of the event).

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#93

Post by wvenable »

oaththrowaway wrote: post #6

I'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.

The last time I did a LAN party was in the 90s and you would spend at least an hour diagnosing network issues before you could play a single game with everyone.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#94

Post by gehen88 »

LAN parties got me into casemodding. I was always more interested in looking cool (to this particular crowd) than actually playing games [1]. I always picked a seat at the end of a row, close to the catering so people would come over to take a look. This quickly got out of hand with sponsors (Cooler Master, Silverstone, among others) and dragging my builds to casemodding contests and trade shows (CEBIT Hannover). I was still in high school. Good times.

[1] Serious Sam was my favorite though.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#95

Post by nottheengineer »

jclulow wrote: post #90
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?

Microsoft does something cool for once and it's an accident?

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#97

Post by thesnide »

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…

Flash. Had a love/hate relationship with it.

Mostly because it was already awesome for the time, so the quirks were rather surfacing.

Very much like an "Uncanny Valley".

And I really think that it was the "steam revolution" turning point of indie gamedev. So I thank everyone that was part of it.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#98

Post by dtjohnnymonkey »

I've never been to a legit LAN party.

I started out (ca 1995) in "network" gaming playing DOOM (the shareware copy, I think we could only play 3 levels). My buddies would come over after school. We'd hook up my dad's work laptop and our home computer with a parallel cable and play 2-player (2 kids playing and 5-10 other kids watching along).

I think next came Command & Conquer, which we played over IPX/SPX also, but I believe by that time I'd set up a coaxial network, where it would just randomly stop working every few months. I'd replace the BNC terminators and it was good to go again.

Next, a lot of "C&C: Red Alert" over direct modem connection (2 player).

Finally, I got ethernet on my PC. It was a game changer, since it was much more common for PCs to have ethernet than coaxial networking. We'd lug our PCs and monitors (think 15" CRT monitors, Sony Trinitrons for the lucky ones) to each other's houses for Starcraft. Running ethernet wires from various rooms to the Ethernet hub (not switch, those were too expensive).

I won't miss carrying those huge things around just to play multiplayer.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#99

Post by finnjohnsen2 »

thesnide wrote: post #4

I remember thinking this TCP/IP will never work out, too complex. Whereas IPX works just perfectly. DHCP was a god send that proved me wrong. Well, until someone, somewhere forgot to disable its own server...

This."Go to network adapter and delete the shite called TCP/IP", nobody raised an eyebrow and just did it
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