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Comment by NeutronBoy | Hacker News Reader

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 eat has definitely improved in the last 15 years or so - no more fast food for all meals.

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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....

Looking back I find it hard to believe it was necessary to format and reinstall windows all the time. But I guess I haven't used Windows in about 10 years either. When everything is a black box and broken as hell there's not much you can do other than wipe the slate clean and start again.

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

Oh god that was me one time. It was at one of those larger LAN-parties with thousands of people. I remember bugging people on IRC (or whatever we used to chat) to see if anyone had an ISO of windows and a CD burner with him. Then looking around the crowd to see where exactly he was located.

Fun times.

This resonates so much! In our group who started with IPX networks to play Doom there was always one less technical kid whose PC was so loaded with viruses the rest of us would spend a few hours helping troubleshoot his issues. A reformat always came next.

Pat, you were a legend.

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.

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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

It must have been DOOM because Wolf 3D didn't have multiplayer. Was your software an IPX emulator? That's how Kali worked, since DOOM was written to use IPX.

It could well have been IPX. As you can tell by the number of edits, my memories of the technical details are a bit fuzzy.

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