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Comment by boredemployee | Hacker News Reader

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

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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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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