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Comment by ycuser2 | Hacker News Reader

I remember playing Doom II over serial cable (null modem).

We tried to copy Duke Nuken 3D over the cable... As far as I remember it would had taken a day or something? We cancled it.

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the good old days of Duke Nukem 3D and Quake World. trying all kinds of network connection with (hopefully working) db25 printer cables, modems, telnet connections, ethernets, no documentation available, only guessing here and there and some intuition to make a lan to work. 3 hours to make shit to work and 24h playing non stop.

I doubt kids these days would have the same perseverance to make fortnite to work lol

edit: kids downvoted me because of the fortnite anecdote

Null-modem connection? That will be a $20/m in-app purchase.

In app purchases in 1993 involved sending a postcard and check to the developer's home address. Such simpler times.

> I doubt kids these days would have the same perseverance to make fortnite to work lol

You should have seen the effort we put into getting modded Minecraft servers to work properly...

I bet it is around the same percentage of the population setting up the heavily modded servers and setting up doom networks, haha.

Only nerds lol

having participated in both activities, I can concur the frustration was very similar.

I had totally forgotten about this... the pure hell of making LAN stuff work across different versions of windows, with weird routers that wouldn't work, with different network cards, and spending literally HOURS trying to get it to work. These days, it feels much more rare that if you're trying to do something for hours that you will actually succeed, but back then spending 3-4 hours trying to get it working there was still a lot of hope, because you hadn't tried every combination of every single setting/cable yet.

I still remember having to add SPX/IPX to machines to run some game - maybe StarCraft.

Today I really have some nostalgic feeling about it. when you look back and remember the effort you put to get shit done, the reward and joy were amazing.

There is this spicy touch of having to tug your PC to a LAN party or go rent a movie that makes you enjoy it more.

One way to emulate that nowadays is to pay exhortative cinema prices and not have the itch to surf on your phone due to sink cost fallacy.

Ye ... enumerating the options.

I had the same experience guessing options everywhere until it worked.

I wonder if that was because I was a kid or it was how you did things back then?

When I was a teenager some friends and I would do semi-regular LAN parties. The adage was that it didn’t matter when we started, or how much preparation we’d done ahead of time, we wouldn’t get past the debugging and into gaming until 11pm.

haha, yes. and when things finally worked out, our parents were already tired of the mess and the amount of noisy children wanting us to stop

This is why we’d have them at the house of whoever’s parents were away at the time. I think they appreciated the fact we just gathered and cranked up their electricity bill a bit rather than completely destroying the house. Once we managed to hire a scout hut for the weekend which was the pinnacle.

QuakeWorld had perfect TCP/IP, actually still one of the best netcodes in a game IMO. Reminds me of trying to get coax LANs set up correctly though, and how everyone's ping would spike when someone was leeching files during games.

Presumably with a utility like interlnk. It would depend on the baud rate you had it set to, 9600 would be typical but you could go much slower. Looks like a 20MB zip, not sure how much expanded but certainly more. At a minimum in ideal settings it would take over 5 hours.

Duke3d was released in 1996. PCs by that point had long included some variation of the 16550A UART and interlnk took advantage of the FIFO in the 16550A. A PC powerful enough to run Duke Nukem 3D should not have had a problem transferring at 115200.

A lot of PCs had issues above about 56k especially if your serial cables weren’t of the highest quality.

I vividly remember when the Duke 3D shareware demo came out and I faked being sick to stay home from middleschool so I could spend over 4 hours downloading all 6 megabytes of it at 9600 baud.

First time we tried with a regular cable. After many attempts, the computer store explained to us kids the concept of a null modem. We bought one on the spot and it has provided us sooo much fun over the years. Money very well spent.

Duke3d over serial worked fine

Copying it over serial worked slow though.

I think I never tried it via serial but remember playing over 10base2 or 10baseT IPX.

Most of us downloaded Duke3D over serial (modems)

Shareware version was only 5MB

I think we probably copied it via a laplink cable. We definitely played it multiplayer via a serial cable.

Serious Sam was as close to Duke Nukem as I got.

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