Cool project!😃👍
A few years back I bought ten identical AM2(+?) systems (plus another two that were incomplete) for 50€ with the same goal in mind. Never got any further with this project.😅 Now that GeForce 750(Ti) cards are getting really cheap they're probably the next thing to get for this project since the systems all use some onboard graphics solution that won't be any good for gaming.

Opening the LAN for friends far away sounds nice.😃 I'd consider creating your own VPN with a modern PC as a VPN gateway to virtually extend your LAN to those friends without connecting the XP machines directly to the web.

Also I believe there are issues with 120Hz on WinXP. Getting a more adequate aspect ratio on your displays is more important than surpassing 60Hz on your monitors imho. 4:3 and (for later games) 16:10 were most commonly used with XP era games. Getting a bunch of 24" 1920*1200 displays that allow you to keep the original aspect ratio was my plan for that reason.

Mice and keyboards could possibly be brought by your guests since they've probably got some at home anyway and there's a lot of personal preference involved with keyboards and mice.
Otoh it's nice to be able to completely set everything up for testing/troubleshooting.

I used to have a small fleet of LAN PCs for me and my friends. In the beginning I'd have several spares even in case one of them turned out to have some kind of issues while gaming (instead of spending potentially hours on troubleshooting, I'd just swap the PC and troubleshoot after the LAN party was finished and everyone had gone home).
Later on my PC building skills matured more and I settled for just a PC for everyone.

However, at some point we started having fewer and fewer LAN parties (and others would host LANs so my LAN would see less and less use over the years). Also we started diverging in what games we actually wanted to play and it ended up with us just playing games over the internet instead of IRL. What also didn't help is the disappearance of games which are run from optical media. It's all online now, which is kind of a shame as LAN parties are awesome!
Then came covid and the tradition with my friends kinda died since then. If we get together these days, it's more of a BBQ and friends-get-together and less of a LAN party actually, even though we still maintain basic networks at our homes so we could LAN game if we want to.

My later LAN rigs ran Windows 7 btw, but it was just a glorified WinXP as these systems were used in an almost identical way to the older WinXP rigs anyway 😜

Tetrium wrote on 2023-04-08, 13:53:

I used to have a small fleet of LAN PCs for me and my friends. In the beginning I'd have several spares even in case one of them turned out to have some kind of issues while gaming (instead of spending potentially hours on troubleshooting, I'd just swap the PC and troubleshoot after the LAN party was finished and everyone had gone home).

That brings back memories of back in the day, where a LAN party HAD to last at least a couple of days, as the first 2-4 hours were spent getting a network running, everybody on it etc., then set last one had driver issues, taking time to resolve, benchmarking and d*ck measuring before actual playing could start. 🤣 I clearly see the advantage of one person hosting the party, having computers and network running ... 😀

[Edit]: spelling

RedCharles wrote on 2023-04-06, 16:59:

My friend and I are building a number of computers for XP Lan Parties. Our assumption is, if we build it, they will come.

We've got about four windows xp machines already built from spare parts and old rigs that vary from a 980x/780ti to a AMD643200/Ti4200.

We're building eight dells to augment our Windows XP stock for a total of 12 computers to start. Sandy Bridge and a mixture of 750ti, 750. We're concerned we're going to be at the limit of the Dell power supplies. He's got a bunch of office monitors I haven't seen yet.

That remembers me of my younger days.
I've participated in more than 100 LAN parties.
Nowadays I prefer PARTY lans.

In many of the LANs I was technical organisator, tournament organisator (StarCraft) or just player.
In some of the LANs I was spontaneousely asked for help.

In one LAN they just had 2 24 port 10 MBit/s hubs and a 16 port 10/100 MBit/s dual speed hub. I had my small 5 port 100 MBit/s switch with me and it became backbone. We had 34°C/93°F and some computers power supplies were connected through a unrolled cable reel. I had to ask them to shut down their computers to prevent fire... well that organizer was not that experienced.

Another LAN had no intranet. The organizers told me they had prepared none because they knew I was joining the party...
(I was somehow involved in the lansurfer.de project at this time)

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-04-09, 06:33:

Tetrium wrote on 2023-04-08, 13:53:

I used to have a small fleet of LAN PCs for me and my friends. In the beginning I'd have several spares even in case one of them turned out to have some kind of issues while gaming (instead of spending potentially hours on troubleshooting, I'd just swap the PC and troubleshoot after the LAN party was finished and everyone had gone home).

That brings back memories of back in the day, where a LAN party HAD to last at least a couple of days, as the first 2-4 hours were spent getting a network running, everybody on it etc., then set last one had driver issues, taking time to resolve, benchmarking and d*ck measuring before actual playing could start. 🤣 I clearly see the advantage of one person hosting the party, having computers and network running ... 😀

[Edit]: spelling

Since I was already in the hobby, I had plenty 'new' builds to choose from 😜
And one of those friends was also tinkering with PCs a lot and also had a network of multiple PCs, so if we ever had any issues we had at least 2 people troubleshooting things.
Most of the time was prepping, installing the correct games and mods.

And I didn't spend hours troubleshooting the PCs and the network, I spend it on troubleshooting my mods used instead 😜
Especially if I had to patch all the PCs on my friends network, I made a patch on a USB stick and patched all PCs one by one. usually this went well but sometimes it would not for a variety of reasons so off troubleshooting I went (again! 🤣).

It wasn't a waste of time though as, as I was patching the PCs, he would be busy firing up the BBQ 😜

All my PC's are networked and "LAN party ready" from the 486's up to LGA1156 builds. S478 and below can all run Win9x and therefore also dos mode. Only have a few later rigs but they all can boot into XP if needed.

I've about 10 screens if you count my modern ones, crt's and what's in storage so would be a bit short if I was to set every PC up at once (The PC's are hooked up to KVM's typically) I don't have the space for such a large lan even if I wanted too though. These days only 3 of us meet up and thats less then once a year.

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-04-09, 06:33:

That brings back memories of back in the day, where a LAN party HAD to last at least a couple of days, as the first 2-4 hours were spent getting a network running, everybody on it etc., then set last one had driver issues, taking time to resolve, benchmarking and d*ck measuring before actual playing could start. 🤣 I clearly see the advantage of one person hosting the party, having computers and network running ... 😀

And that took me right back to my LAN parities running on dos/Win9x.
When I moved out my brother had a few and mum said how come they are up and playing within an hour? Would have been in part because this was now the XP era and partly because my friend and myself couldn't leave things alone so would have "improved" our config between events.

Update. We're still Lanning. Did a LAN at a bar recently. We've got 16 Dells now. Best attendance we've gotten so far was 16 guys. We do about four or five Lans a year.

Still haven't explored extending the XP Lan over the internet yet.

Still running the old 60hz office monitors. Some of them are really bad.

Re: extending the LAN over the internet, I would get a VPN firewall that can terminate a Tailscale or wireguard tunnel. I do this to extend my retro machines without having direct access to the internet. You can also use Tailscale to do east/west microsegmentation to limit traffic that leaves the endpoints and traverses the network.

If you really wanted, you could do this with a Raspberry Pi with two NICs. Run tailscale on the Pi so the crypt operations don't slow down the machines. Do some IP routing in IPTables to NAT the retro machine through your tailscale endpoint; plug one end directly into the machine, plug the other end into your switch or connect to wifi.

geordiepingu wrote on 2026-06-08, 08:01:

Re: extending the LAN over the internet,

What's about IPX routing
and both IP/UDP and IPX broadcasting?

Ipx tunnelling over IP encapsulation has more, and more mature option I thought?

Not sure why you would want to tunnel IPX in this use case (which sounds like more modern XP games using IP), but you can create such tunnels over most VPN overlays, such that there’s actual crypt

geordiepingu wrote on 2026-06-08, 23:45:

Not sure why you would want to tunnel IPX in this use case (which sounds like more modern XP games using IP), but you can create such tunnels over most VPN overlays, such that there’s actual crypt

Oldschool games, like starcraft II, only do local lan over IPX. That's why.

To do TCP/IP, you need to use something like pvpgn, and fully emulate battle.net for them. Not the most fun thing to do just to do lan play.

IPX over IP lets you extend your local IPX network over an IP tunnel, so that two disparate locations can still do "local" LAN play.

I would just put openvpn nodes both sides running ethertap devices point to point bridged to an eth interface. That way the ipx will go through.