In 1999 or so, there was a exclusive demo of Unreal Tournament you could download and play if you had a 3dFX video card. However, someone found out if you created a text file called "glide2.dll" in the game binary directory, you could run the demo in a software rendered mode.

At the time, I worked for a company with a large training room full of computers. The room had locking doors, and a small, narrow window in only one door. We made a cardboard cutout that fit into that window perfectly, and painted it flat black. If you put it in the inside of the window, it appeared as if the room was empty and dark. We called it the "beat-down screen".

We loaded up the UT demo on every machine in that room, and used to get a bunch of like-minded gamers to come down at the end of the work day and we'd play the three demo maps for hours. We eventually added Half-Life deathmatch (I loved the snark pit map) and Counterstrike. None of those machines had discrete video cards, so we had to run in software rendering mode on all games, at something ridiculous like 320x200, but it was glorious.

Good times.

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livid-neuro 2 days ago | parent [-]

I was in high school in the late 90s to early aughts. The school system used Novell NetWare with Windows NT workstations. At the time, their security was lax. In fact, they set up the directory so that by default, every user logged in using the first four letters of their first name coupled with the last four letters of their last name as the username, and the last four digits of their phone number as their password. I realized this also applied to school employees. Most of whom never changed their password. All of whom were local administrators for computers. Some of whom had network administration rights.

I used multiple school officials' accounts to log in, push a copy of UT99, filled with custom maps, to a network share. We would then copy that folder to the hard drive of the school computers and play UT99 on them. We had amazing LAN parties where we would find empty computer labs after school and play games for hours.

They had BNC networking in that building at the time. It took "forever" in my mind to copy the game from the network share to the local hard drive. Totally worth it.

In those days they even let us maintain the high school website using Dreamweaver...

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mixylplik3 2 days ago | parent [-]

I love these stories!

I was a sophomore in college in '99-00 and they had just brought in new Power Mac G4 machines with ATI Rage 128 16MB AGP cards. They were faster and better than anything I had used to that point and it also was around when Unreal Tournament was released which was a big deal. I was the administrator of this lab and was supposed to oversee students working on video and audio projects. But instead, we had epic UT tournaments and better yet, I got paid to be there. I also had keys to get into the lab so we would catch a buzz and play for hours.

Absolutely amazing times.

	▲	kentonv 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		My high school computer lab in 1998-99 was full of Windows 98 machines running a program called "Fortress" which was meant to lock it down and prevent tampering. I made a custom boot disk (floppy) that would boot Windows bypassing Fortress. It was pretty easy. During computer programming class I'd install Worms on the machine and we'd all play. The instructor was a cool guy and said it was fine as long as we were getting our work done. On one of the tests he included a question: "Who is the master of the ninja rope?"