How ubiquitous were sound cards in the old (90s) days of gaming? Did people really shell out $200+ for this pic related bad boy to get better MIDI support for DooM and Ultima?
Sound card stuff is way before my time so I wouldn't even know how to compare minimum requirements. What happened if you had an outdated card? Would there be no sound, would the sound just not be as good?
>>3217138
Back in the day it made a big difference. Not really anymore, or past 96/97 after doom came out really. Processors became powerful enough where the identical thing could be done in software. The main issue is the quality of your pre-amp.
yes people paid money for sound cards you fucking idiot how old are you?
>>3217147
What I mean is, did people get excited about sound cards the way people do about video cards today? Did they buy them day one and strap them in with a sense of anticipation of better bleeps and bloops?
Or was it just a necessity, and that most people went for an older or bargain model.
This also would've been before the days of a computer being a multimedia center so in the early 90s I imagine a lot of general comsumers skimping on the sound card and just having no sound at all. Or maybe they didn't, I dunno, by the time I knew even the bare minimum about computers sound cards were a thing of the past.
>>3217138
Multimedia on pc's started to get around consumer grade pc's around 93-96, I got my pentium 100mhz pc around 1996 with a "multimedia kit" that was basically a soundblaster 16 with a 4x cd drive, couple of games and sound editing software.
No one really got very excited unless you work with audio (and if you do you probably already had an atari or amiga for that).
People just got a creative compatible card so you don't have to fight a lot witht dos and the games and carry on.
>>3217158
>What I mean is, did people get excited about sound cards the way people do about video cards today? Did they buy them day one and strap them in with a sense of anticipation of better bleeps and bloops?
yes, upgrading from just a basic pc speaker to actual midi or sound was the shit.
I just recently (finally) found a prime retro PC sitting in a thrift store for $10 it has a branded "Sound Blaster 3000" card in it and that son of a bitch actually took me over an hour to find the correct 98se drivers for. The motherboard's chipset drivers I could understand having to manually search out since it was manufactured in 2003 but come on. How could it have been so hard to find a fucking Sound Blaster's?
>>3217138
By the way, soundcards, at least the consumer ones made by creative, never ever got "outdated",at least by driver support, all of them were backwards compatible and the sbpro, sb16 and sb32 got quick into the built-in drivers shipped with windows 9X, so they were plug and play. Unless you seek some professional or high end features (and again, if you were, you weren't looking for creative products), you can carry on with any of them and had the same results.
I had to got rid of my sb16 because was an ISA card and as soon as I got my first AMD K6 based build(I think was this one the first mobo I had without ISA slots, hard to remember...) had to get rid of it.
TL-DR: When we talk about sound cards, we were talking about features, not megaherzs or gigabytes, and for the domestic user most, if not all manufactures, were interchangeable.
>>3217138
In the earliest days, sounds cards were necessary for basic audio outside of the bleepy PC speaker.
In the mid to late 90's, they provided advanced positional audio while provided booster functions. Some of them acted as hosts for CD drives. Others hosted joystick or firewire ports.
Then WinXP came out and gimped the audio stack. Aureal died in a lawsuit and devs ditched positional audio out of spite. Onboard sound became goodnuff for the average gamer (despite it being noisy dogshit).
Today, sound cards for production work and those that care about audio quality. The average person won't even notice.
>Did people really shell out $200+ for this pic related bad boy to get better MIDI support for DooM and Ultima?
Fuck yeah we did. The alternative to a sound card was the PC's diagnostic speaker, which can at best warble its single tone beeps with PWM into something barely recognizable.
>What happened if you had an outdated card? Would there be no sound, would the sound just not be as good?
Newer cards might have better sound quality, support more voices, have more/better midi sound fonts, etc... older cards didn't just up and stop working unless you literally no longer had the type of expansion slot they fit in.
On the other hand there were a lot of proprietary interfaces that had to be supported individually by games, particularly among the earliest sound cards. If an old interface fell out of favor, newer games might stop supporting it.
For this reason later cards from most manufacturers could emulate the common classic interfaces as a fallback. eg: adlib/GM/sound blaster
Fuck, I remember feeling like such a baller because back in the day I had the original SoundBlaster Live which supported more voices, so you could play Ultima Online in full screen but still hear your Uh-ohs from ICQ.
Couldn't do that with previous sound cards.
I remember my dad encouraging my brother and I to be good for the holidays or Santa might not bring sound blaster 16.. we wanted it so bad so I remember being really good that December...
>>3217282
>there were a lot of proprietary interfaces that had to be supported individually by games
Eventually Win9x and Directsound solved that problem. Win9x games would always have at least basic stereo sound no matter the card as long as it had a dsound driver.
Of course then other features like positional audio started the cycle of proprietary support all over again with Creative's EAX vs Aureal's A3D. And it's a shame Aureal went under because A3D was objectively superior to EAX.
I remember having an AWE64 on an older computer plug in to an ISA slot, and then building my next computer with an Audigy so I could play Counterstrike with EAX.
>>3217138
>Did people really shell out $200+ for this pic related bad boy to get better MIDI support for DooM and Ultima?
Computers did not have any sound beyond the bleep boop PC speaker. Getting a specialized hardware that could play back digitized samples, do multichannel FM synth, and give you a joystick port? That was one of the most important upgrades for playing games on a PC.
And a few years later they also integrated a CDROM controller, which was a HUGE thing, since most motherboards only had 1 IDE port, and cd drives didn't even use that, but their own proprietary connector format. Soundcards sometime came with 2-3 of those connectors, supporting each one of the major formats.
So yeah, for $200, they were incredibly useful.
There were also cheaper cards that only did pcm or only fm, or extremely good freely programmable wavetable synthesis but no fm, and so on.
>>3217158
>Did they buy them day one and strap them in with a sense of anticipation of better bleeps and bloops?
PC sound went from PC Speaker (bleep bloop) -> FM synth -> FM synth with occasional PCM voice -> same as before but with higher quality PCM voice and also support for recording at a higher quality -> same as before but in CD quality -> full multichannel PCM synth -> full multichannel PCM synth at CD quality (or half quality but twice the channels -> shit tons of channels all at CD quality -> now also with powerful midi effects in hardware -> EAX effects ver 2 / support for 4/6/8 channels -> more eax crap, 24/96khz, etc
So basically in the late 80s and early 90s, a sound card meant the difference between
- 1 channel of atari bleeps,
- full OPL2 FM synth with a single decent quality voice channel
- full wavetable synth which basically sounded like a super high end Roland keyboard
That's quite a gigantic difference there.
Also I should note that some games could do crazy shit even with just a PC speaker; as I recall Pinball Fantasies could do full PCM playback on it, but it required a very powerful CPU for the time. That was the exception, not the norm, however (the game used a full software MOD player to reproduce the Amiga music).
>>3217282
>If an old interface fell out of favor, newer games might stop supporting it.
The opposite also happened. Some old games only supported very early cards that never got backward compatibility in later ones. A few games bit-banged the hardware directly and relied on specific quirks, so even supposedly backward-compatible cards didn't work.
For example the retail version of Jill of the Jungle is 8-bit sound blaster compatible but if you run it through a SB16 the bit-banging it does to the DSP gets mangled by the SB16's low-pass filter and comes out like growling noise instead of the proper sound effects.
>>3217310
>>3217324
>an Audigy so I could play Counterstrike with EAX
Similar here, only with a Vortex 2. Not only could I tell what direction sounds were coming from, but also pretty much their exact distance too. Many accusations of wallhax. A3D was so fucking good.
>>3217310
>d it's a shame Aureal went under because A3D was objectively superior to EAX.
Yeah, EAX was literally just a bunch of MIDI effects that my AWE64 had too, but they just hooked them up to the pcm channels.
Creative knew that Aureal was better, by the way, they literally sued them with bullshit claims until the legal defence costs ate up all their money and they went bankrupt. Then they bought them up for pennies to make sure no one else uses their tech to compete. I think they used their chips in super low end PCI cards later on, sold as Sound Blasters.
Creative is easily one of the biggest scum tech companies, I wish they would've went bankrupt by now.
>>3217368
This maketh me proud to be a singapoor jew. Though I prefer to emulate than buy any CREATIVE crap.
>>3217197
>Because there's no such thing as a SB3000? It's probably a china clone that Creative couldn't sue.
>>3217334
>since most motherboards only had 1 IDE port
Most 486 and earlier didn't even have that. You needed an I/O card just for your basic FDD and HDD interfaces.
Sound card + CD-ROM = MULTIMEDIA PC FOR MUH ENCARTAAlso MYST
you also had to config every game individually in setsound.exe
>>3217450
Thank goyims for DirectSound! OpenAL a shit.
>>3217450
Damn man, that takes me back. So many memories of working through those menus, trying to make sure I made all the correct settings, troubleshooting hardware connections and drivers
>>3217147
^This. OP is so underage it's unbelievable.
>>3217356
This game is from 94? Yeesh, that cover art looks more like 1985.
>>3217635
Floppy + IDE + Parallel + Serial was a common loadout for Multi-I/O cards.
Game/midi ports were pretty rare on the same multi-I/O card as floppy and IDE, though. Normally you got that port via your sound card, or on a serial + parallel + gameport card with the floppy/HD controller being separate.
>>3217750
>Game/midi ports were pretty rare on the same multi-I/O card as floppy and IDE, though
Say what?
>>3217761
>>3217750
A few pointers. Multifunction I/O cards like these follow the original IBM PC Game Controller Adapter spec which means they normally support two controllers via a Y-splitter. Game ports found on sound cards generally only support one controller and they also can be used for MIDI input.
Also you usually need the sound card driver loaded to use the port; otherwise software cannot read from it unlike the old-style game ports found on I/O cards.
>>3217138
>better MIDI
No, that card his pretty bad midi. I think even a cheap as adlib would have been better. Of course non plebs had a soundscape.
>>3217761
They were rare, but not impossible. Most system builders sooner went dual IDE and dual serial on the multi-io card if they were only using one.
Game ports were commonly on their own card entirely before they started shoving them into every sound blaster.
>>3217779
>Also you usually need the sound card driver loaded to use the port
Sound blaster cards and clones had a proper game port and did midi connections via an adapter to the same port. No drivers were required for the gameport.
>>3217158
there is basically 3 generations of old sound card.
adlib, 8bit soundblaster, and soundblaster 16.
adlib was a stock yamaha chip, and naturally got ripped off by others. soundblaster adds digital sound and was a pretty big deal, so big that there was also a fuckton of clones as a result. soundblaster 16 effectively moved the brand into the modern era, but continued to be sold years afterwards in low cost variants.
the main difference between 8 and 16bit sound was that 8bit sound has much lower signal to noise, which means 3d games like doom and friends have a lot of hiss in the sound effect mixing, especially monsters off in the distance .
pretty much all of them were well supported in dos games until windows95 gaming took over and made sound a generic commodity
>>3217487
>Fuck around with it till it works
>use that one setting forever
>find out later i didn't use the best one
Ahh memories!
>>3217912
>Sound blaster cards and clones had a proper game port and did midi connections via an adapter to the same port. No drivers were required for the gameport.
I disproved this theory once.
>boot DOS floppy in a Compaq Pentium 4 box (this had integrated audio with a game port)
>run Maniac Mansion and 1-2 other games
>joystick doesn't work at all
No driver=no joystick.
First computer I had that actually came with sound was a Dell from 2003. None of my 90s machines came with one, so I played games like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFWE1mR8LJE
>>3217979
Came with a sound card, I mean.
>>3217779
>Multifunction I/O cards like these follow the original IBM PC Game Controller Adapter spec which means they normally support two controllers via a Y-splitter.
I heard some of them don't have the connections for two controllers though.
I shelled out $100 just for 4mb of memory...
>Port 220
>IRQ 5
>DMA 1
>Success! Soundblaster has been configured.
Oh man I loved seeing that
Did anyone get sound cards for non-IBM computers?
I have the fuckiest time trying to find sound cards locally. Bought an old computer for DOS gaming, and the onboard multimedia card (it's 98se era) just will not cooperate with anything. If I'm not seeing it on CL / Flea Markets / Thrift Shops, am I just out of luck?
Oh, and is there a good clock control program for MSDOS? The ones I saw were all either non-functional or not configurable enough to actually get accurate speeds.
I think onboard audio was normal by the Windows 9x era.
I know that in my 1998 Packard Bell had an onboard YMF740 chip, so I was able to get Yamaha Midi XG right from the start.
Man the XG sounds made a difference
>>3218191
Midi has a crap reputation due to the FM-synth default/fallback driver in Windows. On dedicated Midi hardware that stuff sounds fucking gorgeous. Nowadays that could be fully synthesized, but the damage is done. Normal folks see Midi as poor man's audio and audio professionals have no interest in fixing that perception.
>>3218000
In the 90's? Doubt it. By then everything used a single chip UMC part that supported it. The designer would have to be literally retarded to not not hook it up to the port.
Absolutely. 100%.
Here's what doom sounded like with no soundcard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZz7QKJIu88
Here's a comparison of doom's music on a ton of different soundcards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXFYWJ7dbz0
Part 2 features most of the older and shittier ones. So yeah, it totally was worth $200 to get better midi support back then. MIDI was a big deal - it still is if you're into making music, but in the early 90's, consumers had to buy dedicated midi hardware just to listen to it.
Sound cards slowly started to become less relevant in the mid 90's, when motherboard manufacturers started building audio chipsets onto their boards. They were, and still are worse than the dedicated cards, but not so bad that the average user felt the need to buy a soundcard. Another important factor was improving audio compression techniques that the increases in processing power made viable. Previously, sound files were too big. 3 minutes of recorded audio was a huge chunk of your hard drive - the main reason for midi use in games was that they simply didn't have the storage space to have real digital audio unless it was played from a CD drive, which again, many people didn't have in their computers until around '94/'95.
Adlib/SB were the normie/pleb-tier sound cards in the early 90s. If you were rich, you could afford a Roland MT-32.
>>3218270
>consumers had to buy dedicated midi hardware just to listen to it
>Musical Instrument Digital Interface
playing back a score is one of the side capabilities of MIDI. It was just really handy in that time of gaming, because it kept file size down, and moved the sound work off the CPU, as you said
>>3218283
what advantages had the MT-32 over SB in terms of wave/sample playback?
>>3217209
>Then WinXP came out and gimped the audio stack.
What do you mean?
I thought it was Windows 7 that broke compatibility with surround/positional features of soundcards that were supported in Windows XP.
I always had problems on XP with the audio randomly skipping, but it's never happened on 7/8.
>>3218341
I guess XP broke a lot of DOS based stuff, transitioning the consumer Windows line from the DOS kernel to the NT kernel
My first experience with a sound card was going from NO SOUND in everything, to suddenly having sound.
I think Dune 2 was the first game I played with sound.
Some of the best money I ever spent at the time.
Then my sweet sweet Voodoo 3 was next, mmm.
>>3218350
that's cause DOS stuff requires real mode. Windows NT/XP brought about DOS in protected mode.
>>3218536
I know absolutely nothing about memory models or how DOS or Windows NT work - the post.
>>3218541
http://www.howtogeek.com/188980/pcs-before-windows-what-using-ms-dos-was-actually-like/
get ruined, KID
>>3218545
The fact that you'd link that site when addressing someone who was using computers since before you were born is proof that in fact you are actually the underage person here.
>>3218548
get shitstomped kid. I only linked the site so your babby brain can process the information.don't think it matters since you're the underage, but when I switched to XP, I had to work with the makers of a DOS-based accounting program to get it work. Because XP runs DOS programs in protected mode, the program wouldn't run due to needing real mode and I had to get a special patch emailed to me to make it work on XP.
>>3218536
Now, what this 15 year old doesn't know is that of course plenty of DOS stuff does run in protected mode, for example most games released in 92-96, which was usually accomplished with an extender program like DOS4GW. Of course all versions of Windows are running in protected mode since Windows 3.0.
The difference with NT is that it uses a completely different kernel and in fact actually has a portion known as the NTVDM which runs 16-bit code. The NTVDM isn't DOS per-se, it's a kind of simulated DOS that works ok if you just want to run text mode stuff, but it usually doesn't work for anything with graphics or that needs to bit-bang the hardware.
>>3218560
>but when I switched to XP, I had to work with the makers of a DOS-based accounting program to get it work
You were probably _born_ the year XP came out. Who are you kidding,
>>3218578
>h-he's lying and u-underage
great counterargument fagdickIBM DOS 5.0 master race
You see, children (especially >>3218560), first there was real mode. This is what x86 CPUs default to on power up. You can access only 1MB of memory which is carved up into 64k segments and there's no memory protection, meaning you can write anywhere the fuck you feel like.
Then with the 286 CPU, they added protected mode. Now you could use 16MB of memory but it was still in 64k pieces. On the plus side, there was now memory protection so your OS can decide what areas of memory a program can and cannot access. This is what Windows 3.x uses.
With the 386, they moved to 32-bit pmode which can address all the way to 4GB of memory, also memory segments can be any size you like. This is what all versions of Windows from NT to XP use. In addition they added virtual memory and v86 mode, which can be used to "simulate" real mode. Any time you run a DOS application in Windows, it creates a v86 box.
>>3218593
>he's calling 8086/8080's an x86
again, hello underage
>>3218584
>call people a fagdick
Shit, he's not even 15. I'd guess maybe 12.
>>3218601
You're getting more pathetic with each post, kiddo.
>>3218602
>still can't come up with an argument
>h-he's so underage
keep trying, you can do better
>calls people a fagdick
>posts stuff about Windows/DOS with grievous factual errors
>unironically links howtogeek.com
>can't into caps or punctuation
I think we've seen all that needs to be seen here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a324ykKV-7Y
>>3218612
>grevious factual errors
>guy who thinks protected mode was huge on the 286 platform
:^)
>>3218616
Uh...I said it was huge on the 286 where? The 286 pmode was too handicapped to be of much use so almost nothing used it except Windows 3.x and mostly because it was cheating and using a bunch of 32-bit features.
I actually don't think I can even name any DOS applications or games that use 286 protected mode. I know the later versions of Wordperfect and Lotus 123 require a 286, but I'm not sure if they actually use pmode or are just real mode+EMS.
>>3218631
There were definitely 286 extenders available in the late 80s-early 90s and some applications used them although I don't believe any games did.
Remember that in 1990, a 286 extender program cost $495 while 386 extenders were running at closer to $700-800. By 1993 however, the price of 386 extenders dropped significantly so it became normal for DOS games to use them by that point.
>>3218641
Phar Lap was one of the big DOS extender devs back then and they offered a free demo version and you could pay a licensing fee to include it with your software. I assume for commercial devs, price was probably not as much of an issue. DOS extenders were convenient although some software devs wrote their own protected mode code instead of buying off-the-shelf stuff. 286 protected mode was pretty limiting although one of the big pluses of it was that going into protected mode means you can access the entire VGA memory space instead of having to bank switch 64k pieces in and out of the A000 area.
Supposedly a 286, once in pmode, can't get back into real mode without a hardware reset.
>>3218305
The MT-32 was actually a synthesizer module. It was mainly used for high quality MIDI music, but some games used it for sound effects.
>>3218659
Normally true. Windows 3.x actually uses a l33t hax0r trick to drop the CPU out of protected mode when you exit to DOS in which it intentionally triggers a segment fault error. This causes the CPU to have an aneurysm (of sorts) and drop back into real mode.
>>3217158
>What I mean is, did people get excited about sound cards the way people do about video cards today?
Yes, but it wasn't as frequent as video cards since the technology didn't move as fast.
Creative really tried to keep it going with EAX 5.0, but by then EAX caused more problems than it solved... like crashing your OS.
So MS just removed Direct Sound. EAX is deprecated as is most hardware audio calculations since modern (the past 10 years) CPUs are powerful enough to do a decent enough job.
You can still do hardware audio if your sound chip supports OpenAL, but even that hasn't evolved much recently.
The last hardware audio effects game I played was Dirt 2.
Actually, Creatives' Sound Blaster Z does do audio processing on the chip, but games don't use that - just the things you select in the SBX Studio... like Headphone surround, etc... although EAX would still be hardware accelerated for old games if you use the Alchemy OpenAL wrapper.
Computer Audio is quite simply, but most people don't understand it because they simply don't understand computers and programming that well.
Ah yeah, Bill Gates actually called the 286 a braindead chip. The 386 architecture was an incredible, almost revolutionary improvement because for the first time, it was actually possible to have a UNIX-style OS on a PC. Trying to do that on a 286 was like performing a heart bypass operation with a butter knife. What's more, this was at a time when people needed to run real mode DOS applications as well and doing that on a 286 was not the greatest thing either.
>>3218670
Which make it sad that MS itself screwed up that transition very badly by turning the OS/2 2.0 project into an entire fiasco.
>>3218674
I blame the whole fiasco as much on Cannavino not knowing what was happening at Microsoft. To his credit, he was right about one thing--Windows was a security nightmare. Both IBM and Microsoft really screwed over their developer community--IBM by throwing them under the wheels of Microsoft and Microsoft doing its best to convince the OS/2 developer community that Windows was really the new OS/2.
OS/2 was also a dream to develop for; IBM's documentation and programming tools were excellent while Microsoft's Windows equivalents left a lot to be desired.
I remember being excited as hell on the ride home from, i think, electronics boutique, when I got a sound blaster compatible card.
The compat cards were cheaper. So it was cheaper.
>>3217635
>Vat. IDE was standard on almost all PCs since 1990.
For harddrives, yeah. But CDs did not use IDE first. They used SCSI. Then they used their own proprietary connectors that looked like IDE but weren't wired as such. You had different ports for Sony, Mitsumi, Panasonic drives... and later they used IDE.
And even so, an extra IDE port was great since most motherboards only had 1 of them at the time, and I'm not sure if they were dual-end - meaning you needed another IDE controller to even connect your cd drive. This made soundcards even more useful.
>>3218793
While it's true that there wasn't a standardized CD-ROM interface in the beginning, CDs were practically an expensive novelty when GHW Bush was president. By the time they became a standard piece of hardware, all of them had standardized on IDE.
>>3218793
I'm fairly sure that IDE was always a chained interface meaning you can put multiple IDE devices on the same line...but of course you can only access one at a time (not until SATA could your hard disk and CD both be sending/receiving data).
>>3217635
>IDE was standard on almost all PCs since 1990
'Cept for IBM PS/2s; they all used SCSI because those were more high end than the typical ISA-based PC.
There were also parallel port CD drives, but they're just data storage devices and have no provisions for audio output.
I don't think there was any significant amount of CD-ROM software until about 93. In the very beginning, about the only stuff you could get were Encarta-type virtual encyclopedias and the only place you were likely to encounter those was in a school or public library.
>>3218814
Myst was the first big thing to come along that moved CD-ROM drives and provided a cassius bella for owning one.
For me XP was the last system I could (barely) run DOS in. I eventually started using Dosbox for everthing
>>3218821
NTVDM only works reliably if the program uses strictly DOS/BIOS functions. Since this doesn't apply to the vast majority of software including almost all non-text adventure games...
>>3218197
I have a 300mb soundfont I use and I love midi sound.
>>3219404
Which one is it? I use soundfonts to make up for my shitty Casio piano not having good built in sounds
>>3218796
Naw, they could both send receive at the same time.
I mean at a user level. It wasnt like the os would be "wait, hard disk 1 is in use".
>>3217138
>old
>90s
Pick one.
>>3218816
Also, under a killing moon, the only good FMV adventure (apart for the mysts/rivens).
>>3219463
>user level
Where did you plug your IDE drive into your user?
Did it hurt? Did they enjoy it?
>>3217147
Oh my god not everyone is some old ass 24 year old virgin god why you gotta be such a fucking prick all the time dude?
>>3220480
True. Most aren't nearly that old.
>>3217969
>I disproved this theory once.
>Compaq Pentium 4 box
Cool story, bro.
I know for a fact the game port on a SB 2.0 doesn't require drivers because my 486 DOS machine is set up with one. It also works with a Y-splitter and a pair of gravis pads for split-screen wacky wheels.
No drivers. No TSRs. All interfaces on the SB are configured on bog standard IRQs/ports and any game with normal SB or PC joystick support works.
Don't confuse plug and pray misconfiguration or proprietary controller bullshit (Compaq in particular was infamous) for normal operation.
>>3220869
It was a Presario 6000 actually with integrated sound. I don't know the exact specifics of it though.
>>3218341
XP brought the death of A3D, at least. It shipped with a basic stereo-only driver for Aureal chipsets, and no other drivers were available past Win9x.
>>3218174
A lot of people still opted for dedicated sound cards throughout the 9x era, though.
Early onboard audio was utter trash, both in audio quality/features and by being prone to picking up EM noise. Heavier CPU load didn't help endear them either.
>>3220901
Not so much on the PSU and motherboard connectors anymore, but I remember they were still a real bitch about RAM compatibility.
Also a most of the ports in Compaq machines were software-driven instead of having proper hardware (eg: winmodems) so nothing worked in DOS or Linux.
>>3220916
>Not so much on the PSU and motherboard connectors anymore, but I remember they were still a real bitch about RAM compatibility
I upgraded the RAM in this Presario once and it used standard SIMMs as far as I recall.
>Also a most of the ports in Compaq machines were software-driven instead of having proper hardware (eg: winmodems) so nothing worked in DOS or Linux.
But that was typical of most PCs after about 1997.
That Compaq is long gone, I should add (the motherboard overheated) but I do have a Gateway E6100 that has a separate (not integrated) sound card. I can try booting a DOS floppy in there and see if games will detect the joystick.
>>3220923
>it used standard SIMMs as far as I recall
It wasn't that the memory was locked down by pin-swapping like earlier shenanigans, so much as they were just very picky. You had to know what you needed/get lucky (density, double-sided or not, etc...) or just buy Compaq's memory.
>But that was typical of most PCs after about 1997.
So was the abandonment of DOS in general.
>>3219498
grandpa detected
I have a Dell Optiplex from 96 and this is probably one of the last PCs to still retain full compatibility with the DOS era (six ISA slots, still has the floppy cable with 5.25" drive connectors, etc).
http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/compatible-upgrade-for/HP---Compaq/presario-6000-series-(athlon-processors)
Here's the RAM specs for the Presario 6000 if you're curious.
>>3220916
>>3220873
>>3220901
This is from 1994 (so before Windows 95 was even out) and the guy says they were largely standard hardware. It seems that most of the proprietary Compaq stuff was in the 8086/286/386 era.
>>3220931
If it's a PCI card it'll depend on your ISA-PCI bridge. DOS games expect the joystick to be at I/O port 0x201, which is where it would be on an ISA bus. If they can't reach that port across the PCI bus, you'll need a TSR to emulate the ISA interface.
PCI sound definitely won't work without a TSR because of how PCI handles IRQ and DMA.
>>3220961
Our Pentium Pro workstations had proprietary everything, albeit those were strictly business machines.
Memory compatibility limitations were a hallmark of Compaq straight through to their Pentium 4 offerings, at which point rambus managed that all by itself.
I was stuck with old PCs with a speaker during all the 90's, being a poorfag back then. So most games didn't have sounds, though Might & Magic 3 managed the feat of having a digitized voice in the intro even with the speaker. Oh, and Monkey Island had some cool sounding music even with this shitty output.
>>3218409
Fuck yeah, Dune II's voices and soundtrack were awesome. My neighbor had a multimedia PC so I could have a taste of what sound cards brought to the table.
>>3220973
We had a 486 with Windows 3.11. It had a Vibra 16 sound card but no idea which model exactly as there appear to have been several revisions.
>>3220983
If it was the factory original sound card, it was probably shit because they never give you quality components in a PC out of the box.
>>3220973
Sierra also had some decent bleeper music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pURVcd-COpY
I've never been that impressed with Adlib sound desu but then again, most of my time with DOS gaming was spent on PCs that had onboard audio that does a shitty software emulation of it.
>>3220943
The Abit BH-6 is a popular fully-compatible board, largely because of its infamous pairing with the Celeron-A.
Slot-1 mobo with a real ISA bus, proper two-channel floppy port, etc... Easily ran a 300MHz Celery at 450 to 500 to make a budget Pentium-II killer.
Back when processors had massive overclocking headroom and were instead usually held back by the cache and/or memory clocks.
>>3220986
No they do not. This 486 had 8MB of RAM which proved inadequate so it was eventually upgraded to 20MB. Did come with a huge amount of bundled software, although a lot of it was inexplicably weird, old Windows free/shareware on 3.5" 720k floppies (a good 20-30 disks worth of it).
>>3221004
Warehouse cleaning? :-D
>>3221009
Probably. Since we got the computer in early 95 and a lot of the software on the floppies was Windows 3.0/3.1 stuff from before WFW 3.11 came out, I suspect that's exactly what happened.
>>3219434
I honestly have no idea. I have no bookmarks and it has a generic filename.
Its one that was created and posted free on the internet.
>>3220424
Wat...
Are you trying to be funny?
>>3217450
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slTHHXWNG4Y
>>3217487
8 BIT TESTING
16 BIT TESTING
>>3221223
Find out then, because I could always use some more in my collection.
>>3221223
let me know when you find out
>>3218072
Pfft, I remember buying 4MBs of RAM for my 486 and it cost me $200.
>>3218270
>a CD drive, which again, many people didn't have in their computers until around '94/'95.
>That feeling when you had a 4x CD ROM drive in '94, and was rocking CD games in the 3.1 era
I still think Journeyman Project was a better graphical adventure than Myst, even if it wasn't as polished.
