MattRocks wrote on 2026-02-01, 11:45:

Games were designed for the technologies available. Quake III Arena requests only 25Kbps (up and down), so any increase on 50Kbps total did not improve gameplay.

Completely untrue, the issue with lower bandwidths was serialization delay causing a significant increase in RTT, couple that with games of the time not having delay compensation means higher bandwidth connections had a hugely positive impact on gameplay quality.

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-02-01, 12:54:

MattRocks wrote on 2026-02-01, 11:45:

Games were designed for the technologies available. Quake III Arena requests only 25Kbps (up and down), so any increase on 50Kbps total did not improve gameplay.

Completely untrue, the issue with lower bandwidths was serialization delay causing a significant increase in RTT, couple that with games of the time not having delay compensation means higher bandwidth connections had a hugely positive impact on gameplay quality.

You are arguing against peer reviewed research papers. Quake 3 client has 25Kbps hard limit inbound, 25Kbps hard limit outbound - and it's not me saying it. If you actually bothered to read the rest of my post you'd see I explained why 56K theory wasn't reliable in practice.

But, in 2026 I have fibre to my house and even that real world performance can drop unexpectedly as evidenced by a screenshot of my current Ubuntu download! 🙁

MattRocks wrote on 2026-02-01, 13:02:

]
You are arguing against peer reviewed research papers. Quake 3 client has 25Kbps hard limit inbound, 25Kbps hard limit outbound - and it's not me saying it.

I made no argument that the game uses or requires more than 50kbps to function, if you are unable to understand the point I am making then any assertions you are making are based on an incomplete understanding of what affects gameplay over network connections. There is more to it than just aggregate bandwidth.

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-02-01, 13:18:

MattRocks wrote on 2026-02-01, 13:02:

]
You are arguing against peer reviewed research papers. Quake 3 client has 25Kbps hard limit inbound, 25Kbps hard limit outbound - and it's not me saying it.

I made no argument that the game uses or requires more than 50kbps to function, if you are unable to understand the point I am making then any assertions you are making are based on an incomplete understanding of what affects gameplay over network connections. There is more to it than just aggregate bandwidth.

Then you have no argument with me!

My earlier post explained the real world experiences only rarely matched theoretic bandwidth. You accused me of something I didn't do.

EDIT: For clarity, I mentioned weather and distance and congestion. What I did not do is specify pings observed when surfing for multiplayer games, and did not specify because it's so long ago I could not remember. But some memory has returned. ISDN gamers were telling me they saw ~40ns. My own 56K observations were anything from sub-100ns to over 250ns. I targeted sub-100ns, which generally meant games hosted by European ISPs, but there was a gaming club (intermitted hosting) in the same city that I assumed used the same as ISP as me as our pings were ~80ns. This was all before Steam, and US servers were too distant for me.

Mandrew wrote on 2026-01-31, 14:46:

dionb wrote on 2026-01-28, 19:52:

[
Beg to differ. Here I (ab)used an old ladder frame rucksack to transport my system by public transport.

You forgot the part where my mom whopped my ass for even thinking of taking my $1200 PC out of the house. 😁

By the time I was doing LAN parties I was living in student digs and procured hardware by digging through the 'broken' buckets at computer fairs for things I could probably resurrect. Frequently the Frankenstein PCs I put together like that only cost EUR 100 or so. They tended to be viciously heavy though as I couldn't afford new HDDs so frequently used piles of old server stuff I could pick up cheap.

Did anyone ever go to one of those huge events with hundreds of people? I never did but I have an old case with several LAN ID labels on it, from events the previous owner attended. At these big LANs everybody's stuff would be marked with super-sticky labels that couldn't be easily removed. This was to prevent stuff from getting stolen.

Not an issue at small events where everybody knows everybody else.

The largest event I ever went to, not really a lan party but a demoscene event, was The Gathering in the Vikingskipet in Hamar, Norway somewhere late 90's, 97,98 or 99 I think.
a photo on wikipedia from 2009 https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gathering#/ … _by_NRKbeta.jpg

I only saw tiny LAN parties. Before seeing photos in this thread (like weedeewee's The Gathering experience), I thought it was a joke that my Z-Alien PC gamer case has a tamper alarm! 😁

Details like that only make sense when you know the social context for which things were designed.

@NeoG_ I did some reading on your points. In 1990s we played one game full screen without background services. When 56K dial-up was new, the network switches used simple FIFO buffers and were handling minimal traffic (e.g. the audio we heard was entirely from the local machine). Now that multi-Gb fibre to the house is common, the network switches are designed to handle more complex workloads in parallel (e.g. Game + VoIP + other stuff). The interesting thing is that while 1990s ping may have been higher than 2020s ping, the 1990s ping was generally less spiky because it didn't have the complex network switch behaviours and something called "bufferfloat". That probably explains why my video conference calls can be fine one minute and unstable the next, and why my Ubuntu download speed sunk depressingly low (thankfully that has finished now).

zuldan wrote on 2026-01-27, 10:12:

I went to LAN parties from 1994 to 2005. We LAN’ed from Friday night till Sunday afternoon. Usually it was at a different house each weekend. So many good memories. Being with a bunch of people with the exact same interest, enjoying each other’s company and eating tons of junk food. It was awesome. We played everything from Doom to C&C…Warcraft…Starcraft…Counter-Strike. Really wish I could go to another LAN party and relive the experience. Sadly all my LANing mates have moved on in life and I don’t know anyone who’s into retro computing. My whole retro experience is lived through Vogons and YouTube 🤣.

Same experience here, but mine was from 1997-2010 or so. But just last month my wife's best friend (her husband) had a LAN party that I went to. They're younger so it was mostly just people playing Xbox 360, and Steamdeck with RetroDeck. It didn't feel the same. I didn't bring any of my whole retro PC rigs, instead I brought a bunch of my handhelds (a few DMGs, DS & DSi, GameGear, etc.).

Back in the day though, we had so many people at LAN parties in our houses, that we'd sometimes trip the 150A main circuit breaker haha. We would setup folding tables in each room of the house.. probably 30 people or so, all with high end rigs + CRTs. There was always chinese food, and Hackers playing on the TV on repeat.

Errius wrote on 2026-02-01, 19:37:

Did anyone ever go to one of those huge events with hundreds of people? I never did but I have an old case with several LAN ID labels on it, from events the previous owner attended. At these big LANs everybody's stuff would be marked with super-sticky labels that couldn't be easily removed. This was to prevent stuff from getting stolen.

Not an issue at small events where everybody knows everybody else.

I went to a few that were hosted at my college (250-300 people). I won the Q3 tournament one year 🤣. I got a bunch of stuff from Asus, Nvidia, and DangerDen.

Errius wrote on 2026-02-01, 19:37:

Did anyone ever go to one of those huge events with hundreds of people? I never did but I have an old case with several LAN ID labels on it, from events the previous owner attended. At these big LANs everybody's stuff would be marked with super-sticky labels that couldn't be easily removed. This was to prevent stuff from getting stolen.

Not an issue at small events where everybody knows everybody else.

Went to Dreamhack in Borlänge a couple of times in the 90's.
Every year the broadband sponsor broke records in internet-speed, was awesome when you had at best 512k DSL at best at home.
Lots of companies came to flex their gear in what was probably the toughest environment possible at that time.

Those were the days... From pre-3D VGA cards all the way into the Windows XP era. Always LANing at a friend's or at my parent's home though, never went to smth REALLY huge.

I quietly read this topic for quite some days now, exploring my long (seemed to be) lost memories of those golden times. And now I start to wonder...
Over the last years I have built this quite fine collection of (nearly) every dream- (and a lot of ok-ish) machine(s) from early DOS to late (and ridiculously powerful) XP machines.

Why not using them the way they were meant: to frag the hell out of each other, to pile up our racecars into oblivion, to epically engage in real time warfare... to laugh, to yell and to just have a great weekend, like we (or at least: I) used to?

Anyone here from my area (Hannover) in northern Germany who gets the same feeling when reading this? Then why not relive these times, just asking?

I never went to one because I always preferred to game in my own space, but I have a special appreciation for emulated servers with matchmaking for retro games.

VGApocalypse wrote on 2026-02-04, 14:33:

Then why not relive these times, just asking?

Thank you for your kind PMs, but unfortunately I am not yet able to answer them. Must hurl out some more posts to get out of newbie-land, I guess? So please be a little patient to let me reach the next level eventually - without spamposting. I will get back to you!

To answer most of your questions:
Depending on the desired era (I would appreciate everyone to play on roughly equivalent performance) some machines stand by and are ready to run. Not everyone would have to bring their own system (most will sport a TFT though, not enough CRTs around here), although I'd very much like to see what you have built "in the flesh", too.:

Early 3D-era: nine machines ranging from 166 to 266 MHz with different graphics: Voodoo1/Voodoo2/Mystique/Millennium G200/Riva128/TNT/TNT2/RageProTurbo/Rage128
"early 1024 generation": five machines ranging from 400 to 700 MHz with different graphics: Voodoo3/Geforce256/Geforce2/Kyro-II/Radeon7500
"1GHZ gen": two machines, P-III and Athlon 1GHZ, both sporting a Geforce3
"high-end 98SE": five machines ranging from 2.2 to 3.2GHz with different graphics: Radeon8500/9700/X850/Geforce4,GeforceFX (all have XP-dualboot)
and two "late" XP-machines: AGP2theMAX: C2D(forgot that [high] number) with HD3850 / XP2theMAX: i7-4770 with Geforce980
And A WHOLE LOT of unassembled spares (and a literal pile of stripdown-cards like TNT2M64, GF2MX, 9200SE, that I never use, but always come bundled with every cheap buy) that could form anything in between those machines above.

(yeah, I know, I'm crazy. Lately someone pointed to me, that my storage surpasses that one of LGR. And I had to look up who that is. Maybe I should start a YT-channel, too...)

What about null modem parties? Do they count?

Even though they were occurring, I lacked a social circle with an understanding computers so LAN parties came later in life, college years specifically where we played a lot of Tribes. Good times, modern online gaming is vicious and doesn't compare to the LAN party experience.

bartonxp wrote on 2026-02-04, 23:15:

What about null modem parties? Do they count?
...
modern online gaming is vicious and doesn't compare to the LAN party experience.

Absolutely. So much fond memories of playing coop-Command & Conquer back in 1995, even before I got my first BNC-LAN card. At least until there were too much units on the map and the serial connection broke apart 😉. We had to establish strict rules for maximum units at the same time 😉)).