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Comment by bigmattystyles | Hacker News Reader

I look back fondly to kid years when I took shots in the dark with IRQ and DMA settings on my boot diskette (so as not to mess with my dad’s settings) with autoexec.bat and config.sys (?), trying to balance out keeping enough available memory for the game but still keep the sound driver loaded. I don’t remember all the details, we’d guess a lot, but still learned.

Also, from the article, the nomad mp3 - now that’s a blast from the past.

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IRQ 7, DMA 1, Port 220H !

Now I have a vague idea of what IRQs and DMA are, but I still have no idea what port 220h was. Don't forget that the Sound Blaster card had a MIDI port to which you could connect a controller or joystick. That was also a nightmare to configure, with calibrations on all axes, button remapping, etc. We were really motivated for pre-teens.

> I still have no idea what port 220h was

It’s the address (in I/O space, separate from memory space) which the CPU can read/write to communicate with the sound card.

It was the other way around: that connector started as a game port that was then retrofitted as a MIDI port.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port

Great era. I remember being unleashed on the family computer and then attempting to neaten the file structure of our various games (Commander Keen, etc) in DOS and copying EVERYTHING into one central directory. Botched graphics display for the games that continued to slightly work...

The good old days when games requires Sound Blaster to play probably. It is too bad Creative Technology failed to transform out of Sound Card market. I remember discussing this in the early 2000s with a friend of mine in UK who is a Singaporean. He said Creative used to be pride of Singapore.

>> I look back fondly to kid years when I took shots in the dark with IRQ and DMA settings on my boot diskette

I look back on this fondly. I got some weird brand of soundcard that claimed SB-compatibility but was clearly different. I felt so proud the first time I got sound out of a game and no crashes. The same card was supported very well by Windows 95 a few years later.

Not to mention when you had multiple devices you had to piddle with physical jumpers so no two devices shared an IRQ. Good ol' ISA.

My dad had an office PC that I secretly put a sound card and graphics card in. He would have gone mad if he knew I had done that to his work machine! I had very little idea what I was doing, but firing up Carmageddon 2 and having it run buttery smooth is something that sticks in my mind still.

Wouldn't that graphics card have shown its own logo during booting, as that was usual at the times? BIOS-extension, and such?

It might have done, but that was roughly the age of the Voodoo 2, which kicked in only when needed for 3D and was literally disconnected from the monitor the rest of the time.

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