20 ms·
> If someone has shared their installation of Warcraft III over SMB it will run much faster if you copy it to your local machine first rather than execute it di
by pvorb 3y ago
> If someone has shared their installation of Warcraft III over SMB it will run much faster if you copy it to your local machine first rather than execute it directly from the network folder.
This one made me laugh. I'm really surprised it started that way at all.
I think my LAN party time was a little later than most of what the author is describing (mostly Windows XP era), but I also remember the networking problems I had at the start of _every_ LAN party.
Once I also accidentally turned off a handful of PCs when I had to leave a party early, because I didn't notice my multiple socket outlet was powering several other PCs.
It's a pity that kids these days grow up without LAN parties.
- bob1029 3y agoWe used to connect our hard drives to a "golden" PC to grab all the files and then reconnect them to our locals. Back in the IDE/SATA era this was pretty easy to do as some of us had controllers that could hot swap. About half of the time something would go wrong with this and we'd wind up teaching someone how to reinstall windows.
- julianlam 3y ago> but I also remember the networking problems I had at the start of _every_ LAN party. Oh of course. It wasn't a LAN party until you spent hours fiddling with networking settings that you could make heads or tails of, just so computers could talk to each other. Then Hamachi came along :)
- Tijdreiziger 3y agoOh man, Hamachi somehow felt like borderline malware (I guess being owned by LogMeIn does that to you). But hey, it allowed your friend who had a good rig but didn’t know the first thing about networking to host a Minecraft server. :)
- donatj 3y agoIt was good before the LogMeIn acquisition. I think most people promptly stopped using it when that happened.
- Tijdreiziger 3y agoAround 10 years ago, I think there weren’t any other popular options despite its shadiness (well, either that or we didn’t know any better as teenagers). Of course nowadays, there are multiple good options.
- doctorpangloss 3y agoIt's 2011. You have 8 Steam accounts with Civilization V. Coronas are coming out the fridge. It's 4:30pm. Someone shows up with a macOS device. The first turn began at 8:05pm. You know the deadline is at 3am, because that's when they do last call at the Korean BBQ place that one of the guys looks forward to all night. There's only diplomacy rule: "No alien governors," you can't just walk over to some amateur's screen and fix everything wrong with their civ. It's 2pm, October 18th, 2004. You have a hacked Xbox and the leak of French Halo 2. The line to play at the Holiday Inn for DECA State wraps around the hallway. A second hacked Xbox materializes. You play the first 8 player game at 2am. It's the basement of the collectibles shop in 1999. You're hiding behind a plant in Zaphod's Estate. Someone notices you and you die instantly. It's still only 5pm. The 8 player match of Broodwar is 15 minutes in. Your beautiful base patrolled by battleships, it's untouched. You're 8 years old. Someone who is actually good is eliminated, and takes over your screen.
- sunnybeetroot 3y agoThank you for the reminder of the French halo leak. Amazing memory.
- physicles 3y agoEven after a half dozen lan parties, my group of friends could never figure out how to get windows file sharing working reliably. Eventually I set up an http server so people could download patches and stuff. Worked great. I put a sign on the wall with my IP address, 10.1.1.32.
- conradfr 3y agoI had created a program in Delphi to remove and recreate network shares with a single click because someone copying files from your computer would wreak in-game performances. And, before widespread broadband, LAN was 50% exchanging files :)
- JuanPosadas 3y agoI remember being the first of my friends to owning an SSD, which was 60GB. Any game we played, my computer showed "ready" in mere seconds while the others needed upto a whole minute.