Open-backed headphones are great for this. Best of both worlds.

Correct! We never wear headsets at LAN parties because it defeats the purpose.

Each computer has a sound bar and everyone just uses that. Yeah, that means everyone's sound gets mixed up and you don't get positional audio, but in practice it's fine and we'd rather be able to yell at each other.

Honestly it's just that how I've always done this, other ways seemed too noisy for me and breaking the flow of the game :)

That might or might not be due to the games we've mostly been playing on our LAN parties are coming from a bit different profile than "chill co-op" — more MOBAs or tactical / arena shooters. In those styles of games visual cues don't really help and not having the clear audio puts you at a disadvantage

The music is still playing in the background, though — the headsets are not 100% soundproof and you may still easily communicate via VoIP

Yeah, the "live talking" aspect without headsets isn't there, but I've found it doesn't bother me in the slightest. You still are in the same room, you get the "shoulder sense" of your team there, you still celebrate and have fun as one and lose as one singular organism, and that's the feeling I've kinda been chasing on my LAN parties and in my LAN centre

There are a few, actually :)

CCBoot is a Windows Server-based diskless solution I mentioned, and they also provide CCDisk, which can do "hybrid" mode — where there is a small SSD in every PC with base OS pre-installed and pre-configured, which then mounts an iSCSI game drive

GGRock is a fantastic product, in my opinion. It is pricy, but where as CCBoot relies heavily on knowing it's inner workings, GGRock is pretty much turnkey solution

There is also CCu Cloud Update, which I have heard of, but didn't try myself, since they sell licenses only in Asia, from what I remember

LANGAME Premium is an addon for LAN centre ERP system, which is basically an ITAAS solution based on TrueNAS. Of all paid offerings that one is my favourite so far — but you have to use their ERP and actually run a business for it to be cost-effective

NetX provides an all-in-one (router, traffic filter and iSCSI target) NUC-like server with pre-configured software on a subscription basis. I am most skeptical of that just on the basis that, from my research, two NVMe drives can't really handle the load from a fully occupied 40+ machines LAN centre. Not for a long time, at least

...and homebrew, of course. I myself am running a homebrew ZFS-based system which I'm extremely happy with

In your case, I'd go with building my own thing too. Does not take a lot of time if you know the inner workings and you have no additional OPEX for your room :)

We were running a small internet cafe with gaming computers around 2000 and I found some bootable solution that you installed on every computer. It saved all changes temporarily and flushed everything on reboot, starting from the clean install you prepared the day before. Sadly there was no way of central storage possible with that program. Would have loved to build this setup at that time but money is always short.

Smartlaunch