this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
1305 points (98.9% liked)

memes

9696 readers
3406 users here now

Community rules

1. Be civilNo trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour

2. No politicsThis is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]

3. No recent repostsCheck for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month

4. No botsNo bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins

5. No Spam/AdsNo advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.

Sister communities

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 129 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

IRQ 5, I/O 220, DMA 01 ๐Ÿค˜๐Ÿป

I was poor, so mine was typically running the "or SoundBlaster compatible" card.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Sounds poor.

It was the early days of computers, so it's not like that's really saying much. Most of it was a mishmash of stuff

[โ€“] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago (1 children)

"Your sound card works perfectly."

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

And if you kept pressing it, it would tell you off. Back when even installers had more soul than their games do now.

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Most of the time it was IRQ 7 for me.

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yeah, IRQ7 was also pretty common for sound cards as long as you didn't need to print at the same time. For DOS games, that wasn't a big deal but if you were running Windows and multitasking with something that played sound (I was an early adopter of MP3s), you couldn't use both at the same time.

My first Pentium PC was all kinds of awful because it used that IBM Mwave combo sound card /modem. You couldn't use the modem and play sound at the same time or it would lock the PC up. It was also configured by default to use IRQ7, so if you were online, you couldn't print either. At least I was able to work around the latter by setting it to IRQ5.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Ugh..

How did PCs beat out the Amiga, Mac and ST with nonsense like that?

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

They could play Wolfenstein and Doom...

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

They couldn't play Doom (until much later). Even to this day, the Amiga ports are lackluster. Hardware wasn't designed for that kind of game.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

What you did there, I see it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

How did PCs beat out the Amiga, Mac and ST with nonsense like that?

I think you can ultimately blame Compaq. It was the first "pc clone" that showed the market that a PC not from expensive IBM was viable. After that even if you weren't buying a Compaq your own generic clone was "good enough". So You could access hardware and software built for a $4000 8088 IBM PC with your $1200 clone.

Amiga never was commodity hardware. It was always expensive. It didn't get cheap enough fast enough. Amiga 500 came too late.

[โ€“] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Open and documented APIs.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Phoenix BIOS/The BIOS Wars

[โ€“] [email protected] 38 points 2 months ago

Because I could play the same copies of the same games on my Tandy 1000, the IBM PCs at school, and my friend's Packard Bell. Standardized architecture was, and still is, a huge draw.

[โ€“] [email protected] 51 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Reading those numbers it's like I can hear the Duke Dukem intro.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Or Star Control 2 Hyperspace theme.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I missed out on that one

[โ€“] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Hail to the king, baby!