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.
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.
I remember studying for my first A+ cert. So much of it was dealing with IRQ assignments and conflicts.
For me, it was about learning the anatomy of the laser printer. I do remember a lot about IRQ and memory addressing, but I don't remember it being that much of the test.
Remember when you had to configure the IRQ with DIP switches?
Yes! Remember when you had to set your HDD to master or slave using jumpers? Then channel select came along and made that easier.
Getting your modem not to conflict with your mouse. Yes, this was a thing.
And managing/freeing upper memory so you could play games in DOS like DOOM.
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 WINAnd 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.SYSI was more a QEMM kind of guy. Also, multitasking Windows in DOS, using Deskview.
Oh 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.
What, no mscdex.exe?
??? The DEVICE= lines go in the config.sys file.
So happy to feel the other old people here.
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.
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
landlinephone it would sever the connection.Ha, my best friend had ISDN, so no severed connections when somebody dared placing a phone call while we were traversing the murky depths of rotten.com.
Of course, in style of the meme, we also had the internet at home. Cable internet, which was slow enough it would actually hang up the Windows 98 network stack, taking down the entire system with it.
*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.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.
I think they made a song with that noise, something dance or techno or house
Barcode Brothers - SMS
Mario Piu - Communication?
https://youtu.be/CGHKb5LSKE0?si=zGhmQNtJoLRcaDyp&t=55"They" probably made a bunch, but I'd recommend you to check out Venjent - Calling for You (ft. Oktae) (and anything else from him tbh).
some GSM phones would reboot PCs if a call came through and was situated near the PC.
I didn't know, that's fantastic!
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.
Soundblaster.
Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time.
Creative Soundblaster AWE 32
I might still have one or two of those in a box somewhere...
Did joysticks actually use MIDI or they just use the same port? You can program so many buttons with MIDI. You could set up an entire cockpit on one device.
They were separate hardware protocols. Thanks to the pinout, the port would get used in different ways depending on what's plugged in. In theory you could have both midi in/out devices and a joystick plugged in at the same time.
More here: https://www.mikesflightdeck.com/interfacing/gameport.html
I mean the MIDI port was where you would plug in a MIDI keyboard, which is just a fancy joypad anyways. So I guess they did use it. I don't think it supports any other protocol.
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! 🫤
DOS games had the best installers. Don't forget to insert disk 4 to continue!
Stop touching mEEE!
Baa-ram-ewe. [Kaboom.]
I'll go with what's on CompTIA's A+ certification exam for $100 Alex.
Mines collecting dust somewhere.
I took the part 1 test right before they turned it into a 3 year expry certificate. Should have taken part 2 also but I have a problem with being a perfectionist and printers were never my favorite subject.
Going to do Security+ and Network+ soon because I'm going back into IT. Not even going to entertain A+. Going to do ITF+ just because it never expires.
Wtf is that top font? Those bitch ass letters are going too low.
Dude be cool I think she has Parkinson's
I didn't notice until your comment but some type of crime has been committed here. Cursed
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?
Oh boy. I'll never forget the amount of fun I had copying them by hand as a 12 year old.
There was one with coordinates to a wireframe of a sports car and drawing it on screen. What blew my mind was the next section where we perform trigonometry magic to rotate the whole thing in 3D space with arrow keys.
Yes, but later, you know... when i actually had a computer
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.
Absolutely is/was. It's how most of the engineers I know, including myself, got started with computers that led us to the career we have today in tech.
Anyone else remember Memory Commander?
I suspect that all this program did was push stuff to the hard drive or faked how much free RAM you had to games.
Stop with the euphemisms Jessica. I told you, I'm not interested.
Thrustmaster?
Typewriters... ratatatatatatatatap click ding whirrr
Most technology would objectively be improved by the addition of click ding whirrr
Add-in sound cards. Sound Blaster 16 baby!
I think my old Logitech from around 1995 plugged into the COMM port.
Reminds me of a story: I ordered a soundcard for an engineers workstation. Had problems with accounting about this. What does he need a Soundblaster for? Well, he actually needed a joystick for his CAD package!
Isa sound blaster with upgradable additional memory sodimms
I had to rewind my games and WASD was QAOP.
I used to have to unplug the printer from the parallel port so I could plug in my first MP3 player and transfer MP3s I had totally legally acquired in 1999.
The parallel port scanner that made your entire computer able to do absolutely nothing while scanning. No mouse input, no display update. An absolute time warp for your CPU.
