A look at Doom's LAN games on its thirtieth birthday.
  • Shadow@lemmy.caEnglish
    34·
    10 months ago

    Man I miss the early days of lan parties. Struggling to figure out how to plug my friends computer into mine via BNC cables (didn’t know we needed terminators) when we got our first ever network cards. Then later the big lan games of blood, duke 3d, quake, even starcraft.

    Good times.

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      10 months ago

      Your comment unlocked repressed memories of having to rewire ethernet cables for direct connection between PCs. And to make my father take me and my desktop+CRT monitor to my friend’s house for a weekend of HL+mods, AoE, and whatever new game one of us had found that month…

      Fun times, online matches are great, but the feeling of a Lan party is something that I think it’s mostly lost.

    • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nzEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      Hmm, somehow I never really used 10BASE2/5 stuff.

      My first memories of “LAN” parties was playing Doom, OMF2097 and other DOS IPX games over a null-modem cable (which I made myself by hacking up a regular serial cable - was so proud of myself when I got it to work lol). Of course, it was only limited to two PCs, but still fun nonetheless. After the DOS era, my first “proper” LAN party was over 10BASE-T (Cat3) during the Win 9x era, and then we quickly moved into the Cat5/100Mbps world. So somehow I completely skipped over coax LANs, even though I started with MSDOS, RS232 and BBS door games. Or maybe I used them unknowingly at school or something. But it feels really strange to hear others reminisce “fondly” about T-connectors and terminators, when even though I’m from the same era, I never even saw them. Or maybe I’m from an alternate timelime where they didn’t exist at all…