This sometimes involved hauling our PCs and (large CRT) monitors over to one person's house. And sometimes commandeering the computer labs at school.
We'd go to dinner together at 7pm and then descend into the basement of the electronics department to room full of HP Apollo 9000 workstations with gigantic monitors and an unreal resolution (1280x1024!!!)
Sometimes we'd play until 7am in the morning when the first students would come in to start working on their assignments, our hands completely cramped from pressing the right keyboard combinations to engage the ECM of our ships.
For free alternative OpenRA with dockerized self-hosted server. Last time I did it code build from master without issue.
Later on we had the fun of figuring out IPX/SPX network drivers on DOS over 10base2 to get a 4 player game going.