• Treczoks@lemmy.world
    0·
    23 days ago

    On the shelf next door is still the box with the hundreds of coax ethernet cables, the T-connectors, and 50 Ohm terminators from the LAN parties in the 90s. Before they were called “LAN parties” and used for gaming.

    • _stranger_@lemmy.world
      0·
      22 days ago

      I remember making a serial cable so my friend and I could play command and conquer against each other. Good times.

      • Treczoks@lemmy.world
        0·
        22 days ago

        Oh yes! We had those, too (as my friend had no networking card), and playing with the red and blue CDs was fun! This must have been somewhere '95 or '96.

        And BTW: I made those networking cables myself, too. They had bright yellow sleeves, and the terminators and T-pieces had been painted yellow to tag them as mine.

        • _stranger_@lemmy.world
          0·
          22 days ago

          Oh man, I remember after we got network cards trying to make an Ethernet cable out of a bunch of old power cords. The error rate was through the roof but it actually worked for like an hour. We eventually walked to the local RadioShack and bit the bullet on buying a cable 😆

          • Treczoks@lemmy.world
            0·
            22 days ago

            I’ve done loads of coax cables back then, not just for those meetings, and later made quite a number of tp cables, too (as part of my job back then). But I had the tools for cutting, crimping, testing, and verifying them and the training, so that was not an issue.

    • theangryseal@lemmy.world
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      22 days ago

      It is crazy how fast time goes by, especially if you deal with some kind of trauma. I swear, my divorce was almost a decade ago and I’ve been with my current wife almost as long. Feels like a year maybe. It just slips through your fingers.

      I was around 20 when that pic started circulating. I was definitely addicted to counter-strike at that time.

      • gift_of_gab@lemmy.world
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        22 days ago

        Oh you said it. I am still struggling with the fact Covid lockdown began six years ago. Or that my kids are almost the age I was when they were born.

        The LANs I went to tended to be Rainbow Six, Unreal Tournament, and Quake 3, and then Aliens vs. Predator 2000. That fuckin’ ping sound, before we all had headsets, coming out of three speakers at once, was wild.

        • theangryseal@lemmy.world
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          22 days ago

          We had a terrible old LCD projector we hooked the Dreamcast to for Quake III arena. It would overheat so you couldn’t keep the back on. To block the light and cool it down, we’d sit it in the window with a box fan behind it and taped cardboard up around it.

          It lit up the entire street in front of my house.

          Most of the guys i played with are dead now.

          I’ve been playing Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 a lot recently and I wish so bad I could go back with the skills I’ve devolved and beat them.

          Time flies and nothing is permanent. I really miss those guys bad sometimes. Been hitting me hard recently.

          • gift_of_gab@lemmy.world
            0·
            22 days ago

            Most of the guys i played with are dead now.

            My friend, I am so, so sorry to hear this. I choked up reading it, I cannot imagine living it. If you want to share stories about them I would love to hear them.

  • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
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    22 days ago

    Can you imagine how bad his neck must hurt by the end of the night? They could have at least spared another loop to keep his forehead supported

      • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        Oh, give him a break it’s probably a dual scan passive. He’s playing Doom through a gray smeary mess. But you didn’t have to log a CRT to the basement… So there is that

  • Grass@sh.itjust.works
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    23 days ago

    that reminds me of when I was telling a friend about the kid who became lion king. he didn’t believe me and when I tried to find it, any trace of the story had disappeared from this plane of existence

    • odd@feddit.org
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      23 days ago

      Probably they were the best player and they gave them all the handicaps available. 😅

  • foggy@lemmy.world
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    23 days ago

    Yo even homies headphones are a throwback.

    You know he was using that with this on his trips to and from school every day.

  • Chee_Koala@lemmy.world
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    22 days ago

    My last LAN Partay was in 2016, that one weekend where Overwatch wat F2P, and we wanted to play Dota but had a party of 6. It was fantastic

  • stinerman@midwest.socialEnglish
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    22 days ago

    I was once so broke that I couldn’t afford a case for a computer I had.

    So I brought my computer to a LAN in a trash bag and set it up on the host’s electric stove.

  • dohpaz42@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    23 days ago

    Back in the early aughts, I worked for a company that did tech support for Adobe products. The company lost the contract to Adobe, and we all were laid off. For the couple of months before our final day we would play Quake while doing tech support. Our numbers were never better.

  • KoboldCoterie@pawb.socialEnglish
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    23 days ago

    Lan parties were basically the highlight of my highschool career. I learned how to set up and configure complex networks just so I could be ‘that guy’ that knew how to fix problems at lan parties. Sitting in someone’s garage all night with 12-16 sweaty, sleep deprived people playing Counterstrike or Unreal Tournament or Worms Armageddon was the absolute pinnacle of good times in a rural small town.

      • KoboldCoterie@pawb.socialEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        Aww, man - I’d forgotten about Empire Earth, that game was absolutely the shit at the time. Wish it’d gotten more attention and credit.

    • Empricorn@feddit.nlEnglish
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      23 days ago

      I never really experienced this, I was mostly a console gamer.

      Curious what you do for work now? Related to IT or games in any way…?

      • KoboldCoterie@pawb.socialEnglish
        0·
        23 days ago

        I did computer repair for quite a few years after high school, then worked in IT at a game company, and currently work in the software testing industry, so… yes! Hah

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
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      23 days ago

      A bunch of people in the same room beating Serious Sam from start to finish while someone played an eclectic playlist of hiphop on the aux for over 24 hours. Those were the halcyon days.