90s Memes

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).

People often believe they like something because of peer pressure to do so. Call of duty used to be a good game that was balanced to different play styles. Yeah, it sells more than ever now, but hasn't been a good game in at least 12 years. Some people like for optics, some for quality and some for personal beliefs. But selling well hasnt been a metric of quality in my lifetime other than Japanese automaker's sales exploding while American vehicle sales crash. I can't really think of many other situations where quality mattered in the equation in my lifetime.

Seriously, it's usually marketing and budget, or simply buying the company, and fitting it into the capitalist hellhole of the bigger company.

I love fallout 4, it's my favorite fallout game but it failed in so many respects. It sold really well. But it was far too guided to be a real fallout game. I won't go into the love/hate relationship I have with it, but it didn't feel right, but was a great game outside of that. Basically, it went mainstream for money, but if it didn't have the fallout humor and universe backing that? I doubt I'd have finished.

My point is that a good game is decided by the player who is biased. Anybody who played the original call of duty games would hate what it's turned into. Originally you could RP as a specialist and pick weapons, perks and side arms and make it a game on strategy. There's no strategy left in the game, it's run and gun, no matter what you choose to use, because that's whats popular. Again, popular doesn't make it a good game. And having snoop dogg, a tree, Nicki Minaj, and Santa clause running around a battlefield feels stupid.

Sales =/= quality.

Need for speed used to sell like gran Turismo. Madden sells at high levels every year despite rarely changing anything significant. Hershey's sells gangbusters despite being as expensive as much better chocolates. Bitcoin continues going up based on literally nothing. The biggest pizza and burger places in the country are of the worst examples in their perspective fields in any given town in America. Everything is consumerism which is capitalism.

Occasionally, that can work out well, like the revolt against live service games. But enough of them fall through the cracks to be popular, that they keep making more, in the hopes of being the next fortnite, or destiny 2 or GTA online. But it really brings down the whole industry because games that lose money have to be made up for on the successful games, meaning they get monetized even heavier.

I went on a rant that may have gone a little off the rails, but I'm not about to go back and read your original point and put the train back on the track after all that.

Sales do not equal quality, and that's capitalism for you.

People buy what is for sale.

People also buy what they're pressured to buy whether or not they enjoy it.