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Going from game port to USB with "plug and play" was a huge deal man. Not having to manually assign IRQ to get your audio working too lol. That said, there is still one thing that was cursed in the old days and remains cursed now: printers. Fuck printers.
I'm convinced that in the late 90s/early 00s, the printer companies got together to form a cartel, and have purposefully neutered all consumer-grade printers from that point forward. They knew it wasn't profitable (unless they charge an arm and a leg for the ink, which of course they eventually did), so they decided to just not play the game at all.
Yes they did exactly that actually
Iirc from a YouTube video I watch long ago they trade mark all the ink printer technology and abused it for years until we made laser printers
Agreed. Assigning IRQ ports was so annoying.
Yea and some fucking cards only had IRQ selection jumpers for irq 5 or 7. Had a situation where I had to swap cards depending on if I wanted to use my twain scanner or play games with sound.
I remember studying for my first A+ cert. So much of it was dealing with IRQ assignments and conflicts.
I would argue that for the humble serial or parallel port printer, things just worked. Yes, the ribbon needed replacing sometimes, and the tractor feed could snag or jam. But that's all a see-it-and-fix-it situation - zero tools required. These things took raw serial data, a straight dump of ASCII characters on the wire. Nothing to confuse and nothing to get wrong. No wacky software drivers either - just tell the software what hardware port to talk to and you're printing. You got boring text, tabs, spaces, newlines, and zero frills.
For whatever reason, the moment we started to emulate professional printing on a consumer budget was when things started to get hairy.
And you got to remove the perforated strips on the side of the paper after printing!
Printing nowadays is so boring.
You'd plug your mouse into the serial port and your scanner into your printer port. Wild times.
I had a modem for my Atari 800 that plugged into the joystick port.
*Parallel port
C:\>type autoexec.bat
@ECHO OFF
PROMPT $P$G
PATH C:\DOS;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM;
SET TEMP=C:\TEMP
REM -- HDD cache:
SMARTDRV.EXE 2038 512
MODE.EXE LPT1:,,P >NUL
SHARE.EXE /F:150 /L:1500
MOUSE.COM /Y
DEVICE=C:\sb16\DRV\CTSB16.SYS /UNIT=0 /BLASTER=A:220 I:5 D:1
DEVICE=C:\sb16\DRV\CTMMSYS.SYS
CD \WINDOWS
WIN
And don't forget to set the jumpers correctly!
You forgot to load EMM386 or even HIMEM.SYS! You might as well not even bothered installing that expensive 4MB SIMM stick for all the use you're gonna get out of it.
That's done in config.sys, not autoexec autoexec.bat IIRC
Also anyone remember that joke?
;fastest mouse driver available
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRV\CAT.SYSOh man the memories this brings back. I remember being sat down in front of a 386 by my dad when I was ~6 years old. I asked him how to use the mouse, he gave me an instruction manual and told me to figure it out.
We often criticize boomer dads but they were right about this point: kids have unlimited curiosity, feed it.
My daughter recently turned 6 years old. She saw a game called Wobbledogs and wanted to play it. I sat her in front of an old PC and told her to figure it out. She spent a few hours playing last night and narrated the entire experience to me lol. Glad she is enjoying herself. Even if this doesn't set off a lifetime of experience in IT she will develop some problem solving skills, and if nothing else she is learning something useful as opposed to being handed a tablet.
I remember having to configure the sound card within games. IRQ and DMZ settings. I had no idea what I was doing so a lot of the time I just played without sound.
DMA, direct memory access. DMZ is a networking thing.
DMZ is also between North and South Korea.
They also stand for the same thing (demilitarized zone) oddly enough.
Well I think that is where the term comes from.
The modem used to echo the tormented screams from the crypts of hell every time it tried to connect. It's ok to be confused, grandma.
ATM0 is your friend for late night mud playing.
I had completely forgotten about that. Thank you for that particular trip down memory lane.
The modem used to echo the tormented screams from the cripts of hell every time it tried to connect.
And if someone picked up the ~~landline~~ phone it would sever the connection.
*crips
If you started a call with your cellphone close to a loudspeaker you could hear the connection being initiated through the speaker. Something like a tat-ara-tat sound.
It never went away.
I can still hear incoming calls, texts, and tower pings with my headphones.
Oh yeah. I totally forgot about that. Why did that stop? Phones started using different frequencies or something?
It's actually a change in audio equipment. If you have old speakers you can still hear it.
GTA IV uses this sound when you're about to receive a call while driving. I remember being confused (and subsequently blown away by the attention to detail). I'm a little nostalgic for the sound so I'm glad it's preserved in that game.
Sound cards used to take up one of the few slots so they’d also have a joystick port since the people buying sound cards were often doing it for games.
I remember buying the Sound Blaster card and “upgrading” my ram for a pretty penny so I could play wing commander.
Oh shit th CD drive connection! If you didn't plug that in, Audio CDs wouldn't have any sound.
Warcraft II Human Footman: Your Sound Card Works Perfectly!
Your sound card works perfectly!
Your sound card works perfectly!
Your sound card works perfectly!
Enjoying yourself?
Your sound card works perfectly!
Your sound card works perfectly!
Your sound card works perfectly!
It doesn't get any better than this!
That brings back memories of the most cursed sound check I can remember..
Wing Commander III's Captain Eisen: God I love that boy's spunk! 🫤
I'll go with what's on CompTIA's A+ certification exam for $100 Alex.
Wtf is that top font? Those bitch ass letters are going too low.
Dude be cool I think she has Parkinson's
I remember this, but I also remember never actually managing to get a serial port gamepad or joystick to work in Windows. Only DOS.
Why are you surprised? The only ADCs in you computer were on the sound card, and a joystick was just two potentiometers and a couple of push button switches.
And I also remember studying Basic on a book on the beach during summer because I didn't have a computer yet.
Did you ever get a magazine like Enter where they had fairly lengthy BASIC programs in the back for you to copy down line by line?
I'm just trying to block out trauma from winsock.dll and figuring out IRQ conflicts.
There was this game I wanted to play that required a lot of memory. My dad didn’t want to spend more money on the computer so I spent a few days hacking the bios, config.sys and autoexec.bat to make sure only the bare minimum was met with drivers for the sound blaster and the mouse loaded and enough RAM left for the game to load.
Making the game play was engineering at the time.