MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-28, 21:23:
That's even funnier with a visual aid.
AHAHAHAHA FANTASTIC!!!!
dionb wrote on 2026-01-28, 23:02:Not inside, it was an external frame rucksack, I just duct taped it to the frame. Unfortunately never took a pic of the kit, but […]
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Not inside, it was an external frame rucksack, I just duct taped it to the frame. Unfortunately never took a pic of the kit, but it was this kind of rucksack:
MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-28, 21:23:
[...]
That's even funnier with a visual aid.
Hehe, that idea. But having a bit of hiking experience, I knew to put the heaviest weight as close as possible to my shoulder blades, so my CRT was pointed to my back, not away from it like this.
Oh I understand now!! Thx
dionb wrote on 2026-01-28, 23:02:
Hehe, that idea. But having a bit of hiking experience, I knew to put the heaviest weight as close as possible to my shoulder blades, so my CRT was pointed to my back, not away from it like this.
Good point! I can see your experience
MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-29, 05:53:
Shagittarius wrote on 2026-01-28, 23:34:
Is that a laser printer on the bottom?
Looks like it. AI is nearly always wrong and stubborn about being corrected. When I specified a model of IBM tower, it distorted the dimensions to match the first drawing, and then it quickly stopped being funny.
Ahahahah oh my gosh! It turned the IBM into a printer
Intel486dx33 wrote on 2026-01-29, 10:35:Never been to a Retro lan party.
Do you guys have photos ? […]
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Never been to a Retro lan party.
Do you guys have photos ?
I would have loved to been to a lan party full of old Mac Classics or old IBM AT computers.
I am Ready.
I have my computers ready.
OH MY GOODNESS!!!!
And how can you even setup a LAN on IBM AT PCs???
zuldan wrote on 2026-01-29, 10:49:https://youtu.be/J1LF4GScs7U?si=wraKgXrYJFlLJT8p […]
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https://youtu.be/J1LF4GScs7U?si=wraKgXrYJFlLJT8p
https://youtu.be/JVrK8n_FhgI?si=uwL8CD-JeGg-evcv
https://youtu.be/ch__Ah2iCtQ?si=v_pu3o-PLIp-3fpW
https://youtu.be/qMwMVsroEXE?si=Ac66Xna8J38fjHez
https://youtu.be/J1LF4GScs7U?si=wraKgXrYJFlLJT8p
https://youtu.be/GQN1gKU9QFI?si=_N1IMRkZ0sCNTS8A
https://youtu.be/1Hvn5gWrvk4?si=X7zhiEyEVO06q9oz
https://youtu.be/mN7oJMmW7j8?si=1prwX9Z2gnJ5Fa5w
https://youtu.be/Rjne0gJ9XT8?si=9mg7oW-pczDoObah
https://youtu.be/Mfd5EQa1N0E?si=FDdLaSQfITreGtYu
https://youtu.be/jfk_UeWGMxo?si=G4Nw0gpYSgonmQ5z
https://youtu.be/r0PmEHLuPxE?si=JvUv_Fn8-8u0zFcz
😳 oh wow!
Thankx!
MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-29, 23:49:
What I love about the screenshots from the first video posted is that it provides real world evidence of the size of tower gamer PCs. Those gamer PCs were funny: oversized, extra heavy, and when deployed at a LAN party they were actually nonsensical.
My own reasoning for using the even bigger full towers was mundane: When we position a full tower next to a desk, it adds an extra convenient surface where you can rest things. I had my coffee cup and joystick there, maybe an audio volume control (I couldn't afford a full breakout box), or even just a pile of CDs. Even more importantly, the full tower usually positioned the CD ROM (or even FDD) near the top (near desk level) meaning we don't bend down to change disks. That was clearly more convenient than smaller towers, even though the tower itself was mostly empty.
But there was a more common reasoning: I remember a colleague at CEX (that's a computer store in the UK) who insisted that bigger cases with side panels removed meant better cooling. DELL and Compaq and HP clearly didn't agree with him, but his views reflected the actual general perception among most home tinkerers of that era. I tried explaining that airflow is what cools the processors, and that by removing the panels he was reducing the active airflow - so he treated me as though I was insane!
And, some people reached for a terabyte of noddy films or other bootleg material spread over many HDDs (probably with various RAID configurations) and all of those HDDs demanded the space that big towers provided - I treated those people like they were insane!
But whatever the reasoning, the overarching consensus is that oversized ATX towers were genuinely popular among home PC builders of the late 90s and early 2000s. That video dates to 2003.
Oh yes! I also TOTALLY loved and craved bigtowers back in the days as a kid... And well, although your reasons make totally sense, in my case the reasons wouldn't even have been mundane. Just vain: emotional reasons. When my PC passion started (in 7th grade, I was twelve), we could barely afford a 286 and I was absorbing computer magazines like heck. And I was seeing those mysterious big towers... and totally craving them. They represented the maximum PC possible for a little kid... and as I was very inexperienced, I didn't even know what things were... (for example, when I browsed the ads on magazines, I thought that HDD size was actually a form of computing power...)... so, the more mysterious and unknown, the more charming... those bigtowers were like mystical objects for me, and we could neve afford one. Always desired, never obtained. And if we could, FOR SURE I wouldn't have put it on the floor, but rigorously on the desk!!! (And yes, probably my parents would have then 'motivated' me to put it on the floor after a while)...
sydres wrote on 2026-01-30, 00:15:
Mostly quickly thrown together lan parties in the hardware lab at college. Before that I would sometimes run an Ethernet cable to my neighbors and play quake3 with their son.
That's great man!
Totally feeling the vibe... typical north American setting, where you have the neighbor's home beside yours and you could even throw a cable! When a kid I came to know about those things watching movies... in my limited life experience back then, the typical life was apartment buildings, and obviously you couldn't throw a cable to your neighbor's, since it would have gotten through the stair-landing, and would have required to keep the doors open...
Must have been nice in College too!
Jo22 wrote on 2026-01-30, 02:26:Um, I must admit I don't have that much experience with LAN parties, either.
I met a few times with friends, though. Carried my […]
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Um, I must admit I don't have that much experience with LAN parties, either.
I met a few times with friends, though. Carried my laptop with me..
aries-mu, if you're curious, also look for "copy parties", which sort of were the spiritual predecessors to LAN parties.
For example, Amiga users met to exchange software, talk, play games etc.
Demo scene also was related to that ("demo party" was another term).
oh thank you!
I had no idea of any of those!!!
I'll look them up!
kingcake wrote on 2026-01-30, 02:48:
I never experienced any kind of LAN party growing up in the 90s and 00s. Not even with game consoles that were networked. I did one time try a dial up game of Doom with my friend down the road but it was too laggy. I would read about them in PC Gamer and Maximum PC and considered them the stuff of legends.
I can imagine man!
Oh Maximum PC back then... I had been a reader in the approx. 2018-2022ish... too bad it then stopped being print... when they went digital-only, I stopped renewing my subscription. Very recently I looked it up and found out it's dead. Too bad!
RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2026-01-30, 05:45:
I went to two LAN parties only. First was in someone's house. Temporary desks in every room, cables everywhere, very disorganised, and groups of people playing different games. Lots of Swapping of cracked games and ripped movies occurred. There was lots of Pizza and alcohol consumption. The toilet was in a disgusting state and so was the kitchen. Once we were too tired to continue we then spent the night sleeping on the floor. Parts of the party I enjoyed, but others I really didn't. So didn't go back for another one there. I took my desktop PC and CRT to this LAN party in my car.
Ahahahaha I can totally feel the whole situation.... (I guess kids nowadays would say 'vibe').
RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2026-01-30, 05:45:
The second LAN party was much better organised. Was in someone's garage. Was all neatly set up with about 20 tables in the centre and each station had easy access to power and LAN. Was much more organised, and we played various games, but all playing the same game, and took votes on what to play next. I have to say, that one I enjoyed more. For this LAN party I had a gaming laptop with Pentium M CPU. I was the only person with a laptop. I was first met with disapproving looks by people thinking the machine wouldn't be able to play games, but actually it did better than most people's desktops.
Sounds much better than the first one!
But 20 friggin tables in a garage? What kind of garage was it? like a train station sized?
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. 😁
Ahahahaha totally indeed!!!
Unknown_K wrote on 2026-01-31, 15:00:
I remember some friends who setup a LAN in their rented house (coax cable running around using personal Netware) to play DOOM 2 and later Quake in the 90's (back when everyone only had CRT monitors). Dragging a PC around wasn't that bad because we all had cars, the only issue was desktop space. All that stuff ended around 2000 when broadband came around. Even before broadband I transitioned to playing age of empires 1, Rise of Rome, and Command and Conquer over a modem with a friend I had in the same city (we also played in my house using a spare PC in the other room).
nice! I missed online playing too until the internet was already there for a while... So that dialup playing also I miss, must have been a nice experience too!
theelf wrote on 2026-01-31, 17:29:
Good...not... more than good, amazing memories from 90s
remember start doing lan with friends to play doom, year 94
WOW AMAZING!!!
Errius wrote on 2026-02-01, 09:53:
Yes broadband killed LANs. I went to a few in the early-mid 2000s.
The last one was organized by a guy living out in the middle of nowhere which still didn't have broadband, so while the rest of us played games he spent all his time downloading our collections of stuff haha.
Ahahah poor guy
Jo22 wrote on 2026-02-01, 10:31:Please define "broadband". 🙂 In my country, ADSL just started in 1999/2000.
It wasn't available in all places, yet, it took tim […]
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Please define "broadband". 🙂 In my country, ADSL just started in 1999/2000.
It wasn't available in all places, yet, it took time.
Ran at 768 KBit/s downstream (128 KBit/s upstream) in best cases.
Up until that, ISDN with 64 Kbit/s or 128 KBit/s (two channels combined) was the best there was to mortals (companies/unis had T1 equivalent).
Ordinary people had dial-up and 56k modems, still.
In 2001, about 1.9 mio. DSL connections were set up country wide (vs 82 mio people).
Internet speed wasn't nearly as good as a LAN connection @10/100 MBit.
In 2002, DSL got 2 Mbit/s downstream. In 2004, 6 Mbit/s were available. In 2005 the ADSL2+ was introduced. In 2006, 16 MBit/s (1024 KBit/s upstream) were available.
Under ideal circumstances only, of course. Line quality of the copper wires of the landlines limited speed.
In eastern parts of the country, iron wires and non-twisted pair telephone lines were still in use sometimes.
Only alternative (except satellite internet) to private people was cable internet,
but it was a shared medium and the vintage amplifiers installed had limited bandwidth.
Ping times were worse than with DSL or modem, even.
The numbers and technologies you mentioned sound exactly like Italy! (except for ADSL which was 640 in download)...
As an ordinary mortal, I also had dial-up (ISDN was too rich). But I had a Trust 33.6k modem!
Iron wires? 😳 wow!
And I don't even know what "cable internet" is/was... if ping was worse than DSL, then non expedit for gaming!
NeoG_ wrote on 2026-02-01, 10:36:
The commercially operated ones with fee for entry scaled to thousands of computers in some locations
Whoooa! Insane! what was the temperature in those places!!! 😳
zuldan wrote on 2026-02-01, 11:21:
In 2001 I was renting a room in a unit. All I could afford was 128/64 ADSL (and noodles for dinner 🤣). Coming from dialup, it was life changing. I was amazed I could play Counter-Strike online (low latency). Little did I know it was the beginning of end for my LANing days.
On another note, I’m shocked that some people on Vogons haven’t been to LAN parties. It never crossed my mind. I just assumed anyone who liked retro PCs had been to a LAN party. Some of my desire to build retro systems is to replicate computers (I really wanted) my friends had at LAN parties.
Yeah! And sadly for us, indeed here we are!
Well, if we can manage to stop the insane elite from causing WW3 and if I can somehow become rich (or at least very wealthy), I'll get retro tech and setup a LAN party in my town... lots of very unlikely ifs...
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 50Kbp […]
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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. On paper, dial-up in ~1999 had overcapacity (112Kbps "shotgun" > 56Kbps > 50Kbps) but real-world dial-up performance depended on where you lived, how close the exchange was, time of day, and even the weather.
On a sunny day when more people are outside playing ball, I could connect to a local server hosted by a local ISP and have good gameplay. If someone else was connecting from far away on a rainy day over congested dial-up they would have ghosting and lag. So the actual routine was to watch server stats to join where connections looked good. If none of the connections looked good then we might try a different game, or do something else. LANs removed the randomness, but they needed to be planned.
So gameplay wasn't only about technology, it was about luck and the social behaviours we developed to mitigate bad luck.
Enthusiast gamers with spare money were using much older ISDN instead of 56K dial-up. ISDN solved the problem because it used new lines with less contention and less randomness so it reliably saturated Quake III Arena's 50Kbps limit - and old ISDN did that better than early ADSL could. Back then money partly trumped luck, just as it does today.
Oh very interesting! I didn't know all that!!! haven't even ever heard of that "112K shotgun" thing...
That's insane how delicate that process was!
MattRocks wrote on 2026-02-01, 11:45:
aries-mu wrote on 2026-01-27, 09:49:
In Italy, where I spent my childhood and adolescence, it was different.
How reliable was your Internet connection? Where were your chosen game servers? 😀
How 'reliable' my internet connection? I lived in the city up to until 2003, with a 33k dial-up Trust modem... then I moved to a remote area... which has been served with an intermittently (poorly)-working 640k down/128k up ADSL malfunctioning 'service' up to until about 2020...And the same problem had virtually all and every areas in Italy that were outside of the city itself... (we call it "digital divide"). Indeed, in December 2020 we switched to a local internet provider based on radio antennas... Since 2022ish most national internet providers and telcom companies started providing FWA radio services...
ehm... "game servers"?? personally, I started my 'online' gaming experience around 2011ish... playing DarkOrbit (don't remember the server) and Alien VS Predator 2010... then life got super busy and that was it....
MattRocks wrote on 2026-02-01, 12:40:
zuldan wrote on 2026-02-01, 11:21:
I just assumed anyone who liked retro PCs had been to a LAN party.
My view is that a lot of retro gaming is about exploring earlier memories. There would be overlaps because everyone had different personal circumstances, but looking at the size and weight of steel PC towers (let alone the monitors) LAN parties were not kid-friendly.
I totally agree with everything you just said.
Just to point out to Zuldan... not only I had never been to a LAN party, but for most of my life I didn't even know LAN parties existed!
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.
😳 don't know what you're talking about but sounds interesting!
MattRocks wrote on 2026-02-01, 13:02:
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! 🙁
😳
Whoa!
Guys a battle just began here!
dionb wrote on 2026-02-01, 13:50:
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.
Wow! Sounds like adventures... never thought of going to those fairs... well my small Italian city didn't have any...
What's a "student dig"???
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.
wow interesting!
weedeewee wrote on 2026-02-01, 20:04:
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
😳 😳 😳 😳 😳 !!!!!
wiretap wrote on 2026-02-02, 12:51:
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.
Ooohhh wow!
Ahahah imagine you brought some retro bigtower rig at that youngsters' LAN handhelds party! 😁 The scene them moment you entered would have been epic, and so their faces!
Wow 30 people! An average Italian household has just a 3-4 KW service...
What does "Hackers playing on the TV on repeat" mean??
wiretap wrote on 2026-02-02, 12:55:
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.
Wow! and Congrats!
bofh.fromhell wrote on 2026-02-02, 15:56:
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.
I didn't know dreamhack before!!!
VGApocalypse wrote on 2026-02-04, 14:33: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 […]
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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?
My goodness this is all GREAT! I'm far away from you, but definitely do that! Find local enthusiasts and relive the golden age! Keep us posted! And good luck with having those many different eras-machines communicate with each other... especially old DOS ones...
VGApocalypse wrote on 2026-02-04, 22:46:
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...)
Oh please! Definitely do the YT channel!
I looked LGR up and all I could keep see popping is an eyeglasses brand 🤣....
bartonxp wrote on 2026-02-04, 23:15:
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.
What's "null modem" parties???
About the rest, even though I never experienced LAN parties, I can totally feel and guess why they don't compare to modern 'vicious' online gaming! Good choice of words!
They said therefore to him: Who are you?
Jesus said to them: The beginning, who also speak unto you
Computers should be fun inside not outside! 😉 (by Joakim)
