I'd say the primary benefit of LAN parties now is how capable "old" hardware is. I have several laptops I configure with Linux and several games and environments loaded up. Smoke test the whole thing before anybody gets here. This year we played UT2004 with custom maps and characters. That game ran flawlessly on a 10 year old laptop with no dGPU. Emulation as well, but I actually still have most of those systems still.
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I'd say the primary benefit of LAN parties now is how capable "old" hardware is. I have several laptops I configure with Linux and several games and environments loaded up. Smoke test the whole thing before anybody gets here. This year we played UT2004 with custom maps and characters. That game ran flawlessly on a 10 year old laptop with no dGPU. Emulation as well, but I actually still have most of those systems still.