geekman7473

There is a section in here on piracy. That has always been part of it for me as well.

Please forgive the SEO optimized title, but I put together a blog post as a one-stop-shop guide for hosting a small LAN party in your home. I figure that if you are hosting a huge public LAN then you probably know what you are doing, and don't really need a guide. Presumably running smaller parties in your house is the gateway to doing the big ones anyways.

LAN parties are a dying tradition, so I hope that writing down some of what I've learned over the years will inspire others to give hosting a LAN a shot, especially the younger gamers out there. I ran my first LAN ~15 years ago when I was a teenager, and I hope that today's teenagers give LANs a go as well.

Raymond Chen often makes it to the front page here, but in case you haven't seen it: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

This is my favorite from him: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220426-00/?p=10...

For now, no. I would want to clean up the innards quite a bit before releasing the source, and it has already consumed so much of my time as it is. I also need to figure out Linux support as well before really "going public".

You would be surprised. Many of my guests are professional software engineers, and they still struggle with these types of things. I suspect this is downstream of how streamlined the gaming experience has become in the last 15 years. Most people are buying, downloading, installing, and launching games exclusively through launchers these days, so even the technically minded might not have the muscle memory for "the old ways." I have also had to explain to people "yeah you just click on game.exe" who then didn't know what I meant by "DOT E-X-E". It's just a sign of the times.

I'm torn on this issue as well. I have fond memories of the janky setups, but also it is nice to actually have time to play games at the party. At some LANs, I've spent hours and hours just trying to get everyone in the game and playing. Plus with a setup like his you don't have to worry about finding older games that will run on the lowest common denominator hardware that people bring.

As you said though, there was a certain magic those days...

LAN parties aren't dead! Some of us are keeping the magic alive. I throw LAN parties at my house about twice a year. The hardest part, as i've gotten older, has been scheduling. Now I need to send save-the-dates 2 months in advance, and the length is capped at about 12 hours. When I was a teenager we would go all night :)

I am moderately obsessed with LAN parties, so I built a file sharing tool for LAN parties specifically, if you want to check it out https://justinbecker.dev/blog/2026/05/16/why-i-built-lanbuck...

TL;DR the author attempts to measure the ratio between native and emulated performance using Microsoft Prism on Windows. His measurements suggest that the emulated performance is very close to native performance.

Though I am not skeptical of the authors methodology, I do suspect that the ARM64 build of WoW may not be as "optimized" as the x64 build. This is because in some of his workloads the emulated game actually outperformed the native game.