More PC shenanigans - building a media centre and gaming rig....

wolsnah

I recall taking the best part of six hours to get my three speed cd writer working. I had a sound blaster pro at the time which I think had the interface port on it for connecting the IDE cable, but also had an EIDE card. Could I get either to work? Could I buggery. No internet to help, about three two inch square pages of instructions and a floppy disk with a device driver on it.

The joys of finally getting it to work after much faffing with config.sys and autoexec.bat and jumper settings on the cards at about one o'clock in the morning was beyond belief. After all that, I only had one PC Format cover CD to put in it that I'd bought specially to try it out.

Things have come on so much since then, I still find it amazing that you can just plug a cable in now and be done with it.

crunchman

Newer ones are a lot better.  I remember having to play around with jumpers, and having all kinds of problems getting Windoze to recognize hardware - had great fun with a sound card once.  These days most things seem to work reasonably easily.

digitalscream

crunchman said:

Newer ones are a lot better.  I remember having to play around with jumpers, and having all kinds of problems getting Windoze to recognize hardware - had great fun with a sound card once.  These days most things seem to work reasonably easily.

Ah yes, the joys of not having enough RAM left under the 640k ceiling to load the sound card drivers...

PolarityMan

I remember building elaborate menu systems using config.sys / autoexec.bat loading different combinations of things into EMS or XMS depending on what game I was loading. From what I recall the qemm driver was a godsend.

I had also totally forgot that in the early days you always plugged your CD via the soundcard. I *do* however remember getting my first CD rom drive when they werent common and the drivers were on CD. At that time it wasnt trivial to just find someone with a cd drive and ask them to copy them off.

Anyone remember encarta?

FX_Munkee

digitalscream said:

crunchman said:

Newer ones are a lot better.  I remember having to play around with jumpers, and having all kinds of problems getting Windoze to recognize hardware - had great fun with a sound card once.  These days most things seem to work reasonably easily.

Ah yes, the joys of not having enough RAM left under the 640k ceiling to load the sound card drivers...

or hours configuring extended and expanded memory to get Wing Commander 2 to load.

crunchman

PolarityMan said:

Anyone remember encarta?

Yes.  I was a teacher for a couple of years in the mid-late 90s.  If you gave the kids a homework to research something, about a third of the class would come back with exactly the same Encarta article.

Emp_Fab

Ahh this brings back memories!  ....horrible horrible memories!

Windows 95 coming out on thirteen floppy discs, PCAnywhere, Norton Disk Doctor, X-modem, LHArc, 9600 baud modems, Compuserve, Fidonet and the other precursor to the Internet, local BBS systems.  I loved BBS!  Seeing the ASCII graphic of your favourites scroll up the page was such a thrill!  Getting bollocked for hogging the house phone line etc!

octatonic

Who let Grandad in?

Emp_Fab

I'll have you know my first modem was a 300 baud model.  That's 300 bits per second to you young whippersnappers who've never heard the term "baud".  I'm getting 55 Million bits per second now.  Do you have ANY idea how long it takes to download porn at 300 baud ??  And, everybody had pubes back then.

Drew_TNBD

Can you old pissers who have never even read the Oghma Infinium just piss orrffff outta mah thread?! Take yer beads elsewarez!! 

Axe_meister

Pah! I had an acoustic coppler you had to tie to your telephone with rubber bands.

Emp_Fab

Meh... that's nothing...  I used t'ave to read out "one, one, zero, one, zero, one, one" etc to a chap on t'other end who write it all down wi' a quill.  

Tell that t'kids of today and they won't believe you.

TimmyO

Emp_Fab said:

Pah...  I'll bet nobody here remembers when your choice was CGA or EGA and graphics cards came in 8 or 16 bit ISA form factors - with jumpers to select the IRQ.

ha yes, and there was always 2 things that could only be IRQ7 (fuck you Soundblaster) 

Aidanspaghetti

Ah but those Secret of Monkey Island insults were worth it all....