this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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I remember having to install drivers , various DLLs , runtimes and whatnot in order to get PC games to run, yeah.
People forget how much of a pain in the dick PC gaming was before steam
"This game doesn't work unless you set IRQ to 7 and DMA to 1 and tell it you have a Sounblaster"
Soundblaster?
Nope, you have to go manually rename a .dll to "Sounblaster.dll" or it will crash at the start of level 3.
The d is silent.
Especially if the IRQ and DMA are set wrong.
i can't remember what those did anymore, i just remember having to get them exactly right on the bootdisk
IRQs were for setting up interrupts (stands for interrupt request). The CPU supports arbitrary interrupts from other hardware installed on the PC (like a soundcard saying that its buffer has room or is almost empty) but needed to map them to IDs so that they could be handled by the correct driver/code and didn't try to handle that soundcard interrupt as if it was coming from the keyboard and treating it as a keypress.
DMA stands for direct memory access and is used for communication between devices and the system. You had to set it up so that it didn't overlap with other important memory, like another device's DMA region, or memory used by the game or kernel (which, at the time, weren't really seperate).
Both of these things are still present on today's PCs but just have better management and support for the edge cases that previously caused issues (like drivers can support sharing an IRQ with other devices and the OS can handle allocating DMA spaces).
The installer for Command & Conquer was so magical. It had a voice guiding you through the installation without you having to configure it.
I remember one of them requesting the CD key, adding "YOU HAVE THIRTY SECONDS TO COMPLY".
12 year old me never entered a code so quickly.
GTFO of here with your ancestral soundblaster chants!
I am DOSPROMPTR, keeper of beep & boop!
Shielder from .exe!
well less steam and more opengl and what would later be DirectX. the 90's was plagued with proprietary game library graphics APIs.
Like DirectX until good developers moved to Vulkan.
even with opengl/directx you had to manage the libraries
You still have to install a bunch of shit with Steam, it just mostly does it all in the background.
yeah, IT does it in the background, not ME
I hear one can do it manually, etc., and not have to worry about De$$vo borking your finite game time.
Fallout 4 mods getting broken (on purpose) through forced updates was the only lesson I needed on why Steam sucks (or how I learned much pain in keeping settings or learned to love the bomb)
Just uncheck update by default on basically any game you mod.
It's also not steams fault the developers update the game lmfao
FTFY 😜
pirate<consumer
Incorrect.
I don't think the meme is referencing computer gaming
Modifying CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT is always fun.
There was a time when games magazines published code to be manually entered, fully, in order to run the game. Green screens, Model M keys, the works. It was wild, lemme tellya.
Delete it all & rebuild society from ThE ~~GROND~~ ^ground UP!!!
The pain started way before that, you had to check the LIST of compatible GPUs, and Im not talking "AMD 5000 series or newer" list, Im talking a list of each and every GPU that can play the game
And to say nothing the hacking. especially in the less popular shooters.