The Technomancer’s Tales — Stories of Compute from 8088 to the Modern Era, Side Tale 2 — The Home LAN Bunker (Final Form) | by Cypher619 | Nov, 2025

⚡ Building the Arena

By the late 90s, I wasn’t just tinkering with computers anymore — I was engineering experiences. Most kids my age spent their money on cars or stereos. Me? I spent mine on overclocked Celerons, Diamond Viper video cards, and stacks of Ethernet cable.

At 18 and 19, working for the county and still living at home, I had disposable income — and I used it to transform my parents’ house into something few people had ever seen: a dedicated LAN arena.

Not one or two machines. Eight full gaming stations, networked, tuned, and battle-ready.

🖥️ The Hardware

This was the wild west of computer parts buying. I wasn’t shopping at Best Buy or CompUSA — I was prowling the aisles of computer shows, pitting vendors against each other, waiting until the last hour when they didn’t want to haul gear home.

That’s how I scored the high-ticket items — motherboards, CPUs, GPUs — for under $100. The rest came from surplus shops, haggled deals, and secondhand treasure hunts.

Every rig was built from hustled parts, pieced together like a puzzle:

• CPU: Intel Celeron 300A, overclocked past 450 MHz
• Motherboards: Abit BH6 (legendary for overclocking)
• Graphics: Diamond Viper cards — V550 (RIVA TNT) and V770 (RIVA TNT2), the workhorses of the late 90s
• Storage: IBM Deskstars or Quantum Fireballs (the iconic, high speed, noisy drives of their time)
• Network: 100Mbps Ethernet, routed through my custom-built firewall

🖥️ The Backbone

The heart of the LAN wasn’t just the gaming rigs — it was the infrastructure I built behind the scenes:

• NetWare 4.x Server — Dual Celeron 300A’s on an ABIT BP6, six 40GB drives in RAID-5. Handled file, print, and disc services, with every game CD copied to disk and root-mapped. No swapping discs, no downtime — instant loads for everyone.
• Quake III Arena / Unreal Tournament Server — Another dual-Celeron BP6 box, tuned and dedicated to fragging. Connected to the outside world through a custom router, it could host 16 players, splitting evenly between local and online challengers.

🌐 The Router — GnatBox on a 486

In the late 90s, most people didn’t even have a router. If they did, it was a clunky, store-bought box. I wasn’t “most people.”

I built mine.

• Platform: 486DX4–100
• NICs: Dual Intel Pro/100B Ethernet cards
• Software: GnatBox firewall/router

This little beast handled NAT, firewalling, and traffic shaping years before “gaming routers” were a thing. It linked our LAN to the cable modem and kept everything airtight inside.

For comparison, the “cutting edge” consumer option around Y2K was the Linksys BEFSR41 — that iconic blue-shell router that later inspired the WRT54G’s design.

It was fine for home web browsing, but it couldn’t touch the throughput, stability, or flexibility of my 486 GnatBox, which had already been running strong for years.

What it enabled was unheard of back then:

• A Quake III Arena server open to 16 remotes
• Seamless balance of 8 local vs 8 online players
• Latency so low there was effectively no lag — even during all-out firefights

🏠 The Living Room Arena

The setup was pure Technomancy:

• Three PCs lined up on each 8-foot banquet table, six in total.
• Another pair squeezed in, for a total of eight LAN-ready battle stations.
• 17″ Shamrock CRT monitors, bought secondhand for $45 each, their glow lighting up the living room.
• Ethernet cables draped like vines across the carpet.
• Pizza boxes stacked nearby, Jolt cola cans clattering onto the floor.

Meanwhile, the servers, router, and switch weren’t in the living room at all. They were rack-mounted in my bedroom — a humming command center that powered everything.

🎮 The Games

Our LAN wasn’t about one title — it was an entire era’s library of multiplayer legends:

• RTS Warfare: StarCraft I & II, Warcraft II & III, Command & Conquer series, Dune 2000, Star Trek Armada
• Mechs & Machines: MechWarrior 2, Heavy Gear II
• Space & Strategy: Wing Commander: Armada/Prophecy, Starfleet Command series
• Fantasy & Chaos: Diablo, Die by the Sword
• Arena Shooters: Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament

We’d fill the room with CRT glow, the click of Deskstar drives, and the shouts of victory or frustration echoing over Ethernet.

And when it was time for Quake III or Unreal Tournament? Eight local LAN warriors vs. eight remote players from the Internet.

💾 Steam Before Steam

Here’s the detail that really set our LAN apart: We didn’t use CD drives.

Every game CD was copied to a folder on the NetWare server. Each client was root-mapped to that folder — so the games thought they were running straight from disc.

No disc swapping. No “who’s got the CD?” panic. Just instant loads, from a RAID-backed server.

We had digital distribution years before Steam existed. But ours ran on Novell NetWare, dual Celerons, and six clattering Deskstars.

And since no LAN was complete without it, the server also held a massive MP3 stash — thousands of tracks ripped straight from CDs, traded across friends, and queued up in Winamp playlists.

The soundtrack of our LAN battles was as legendary as the games themselves.

🕹️ Closing

Looking back, I realize I wasn’t just setting up LAN games. I was building infrastructure — a mini data center disguised as a teenager’s gaming den.

For my friends, it was just epic weekends of StarCraft, Armada, Diablo, and fragfests in Unreal Tournament and Quake III. For me, it was the Technomancer’s training ground — proof that even then, I could bend the machine to my will and make it more than what it was meant to be.