How did you learn to tune those? It was all trial and error for me. I'd love to see a blogpost about this so I can finally learn all the things that I should have done but didn't back in the day :)
I spent my allowance on computer books about MS-DOS and various programming languages, assembler, interrupts, how computers worked, etc, etc.
I was obsessed with learning every little program that was in that dos folder, and how to write batch files and properly tune the config.sys. Then windows hit and there were ini files to explore. Plus you could hack a lot of old dos games with binary file editors.
I was just so passionate about everything. I feel sorry that all of this is just handed to my kids now. They’ll never choose to do the deep dive unless something takes over their brain.
If my friend’s dad hadn’t taken me to their old 286 and ran “type command.com” to make a bunch of gibberish appear on the screen I have no idea where I would be today. I was hooked from that moment.
The original 8-bit cards could be configured through jumpers on the card, and the settings you put into autoexec.bat or individual setup programs for your games, simply had to match the hardware settings.
Later, plug'n'play meant that your PC's BIOS could auto-detect and auto-assign everything to avoid collisions, so you didn't have to bother with it.
which at the beginning was rather plug and pray.