Period correct hardware and friends
Last weekend we did a trip down memory lane; a LAN party using period correct Windows 98 hardware and four old (also) period correct friends. I played a ton of LAN parties back in the day and was often the organizer of large ones, sometimes up to about 20 people. Then there was a big gap when everyone was busy building families and careers for a decade or two. But rest assured, it is still just as fun today as back then. It might be even more fun today, because grumpy old men like us have now learned to value time in a completely different way. I am hard pressed to come up with any better way to spend time than an event such as this.
I think it was around the COVID years and the crypto boom that the retro PC market also exploded. Regular, modern gaming PCs suddenly saw extreme price increases, mostly in the GPU department. The price hikes were so tough that I suspect some people decided to get into older gaming instead and brush off that huge backlog that most gamers sit on. And you don’t need to buy a fancy new machine for that. Some of us, me included, decided to go even further back in time and revive those old Windows 98/2000/XP machine for some proper retro gaming. Those things are E-waste since many years and should be dirt cheap, right? Wrong. As long as they were available in abundance, they were dirt cheap, but now the market has dried up. Almost everyone has sent their old gaming machines to a landfill and when the few that remain hit the point when demand starts to far outweigh the supply, prices explode very quickly. I saved most of my old PCs from the landfill fortunately, and I was a bit surprised to see how much some of them were selling for on eBay.
I love fixing things and a couple of years ago, I couldn’t resist the temptation to try and start up some of my old machines. They still worked more or less perfectly. I think the hardware was built a bit tougher back then, with big chunky components, filled with not so environmentally friendly solder and chemicals, but hey, if it makes them harder to kill than Keith Richards, I guess that is still a good thing, right? Anyways, I tinkered on for some years and managed to restore a whole bunch of retro battle stations and a couple of laptops from the era. And now we are about to establish a revived habit of throwing LAN parties. I am beyond happy with this outcome. It is also quite fun to see the positive reactions from others.
But to do this, I suspect you must be a bit strange in the head, like me. First you must own a solid supply of “E-waste”. Second, you must learn the knowledge to make it work, which was a lot more hardcore compared to how easy and standardised everything is today. But that second part is something I love and cannot get enough of. To figure out and repair an old machine gives me similar pleasure to laying a puzzle. My wife shakes her head and says that there is a hoarder warning on me. She is probably correct, as always… She said this after I won a web auction with 60 brand new power cables for the price of two draught beers. I only needed 5-10 but it is good to have 50 spare ones if the total price is also lower than buying two new ones in a store. Other notable examples of great auctions I won are ten mice, seven VGA monitors, seven keyboards… paired with the stuff I already had, it has turned into a machine park to die for around the millennium. With a bit of patience, web auctions can become crazily good deals if you just wait it out. My seven keyboards for example, I won that one for 3 SEK. That kind of stuff is available in great abundance today. To use USB peripherals and modern flat screens with Windows 98 is no problems whatsoever. If you want to be 100% period correct, with ball mice and CRT screens on the other hand, that will cost a fortune for sure today. But I don’t see the point with that. I kept the good stuff from the era – CPU+mobo and GPU and replaced the rest with modern parts. Especially the PSU is a wise upgrade, so you don’t fry your rarities. And running Windows 98/XP on a modern SSD drive is also a great and recommended experience. It is mind-bogglingly snappy and fast. Much better that a modern computer actually (!).
This post can go on forever, but the key question which was also raised during the LAN party remains. Why on Earth should you complicate things by running these old games on period correct hardware, when you can run most of them using emulators or remastered editions today? The number one reason that comes to mind is the social aspect of it. These systems are never connected to the internet. They are running on an offline network. Combined with the fact that we are all sitting in the same room and no-one, repeat no-one opened a web browser or social media of any kind for two days, and you have a recipe for success. Everyone was just so much more present, and nowadays, that is something rarer than a 3DFX SLI setup. That alone makes it worth the hassle 10 times over for me. With modern machines, I think they outcome would be very different. Modern game releases do not even support local area network connections anymore, or they have been removed in the remaster. So, the result is that my tinkering with “E-waste” has now been converted into memories for life. Good times with old friends.