General Computer Thread

[Marc]

, but Windows 10 does not have any drivers for it. Detects it as a Rumblepad 2, but it doesn't work properly.

but that's a issue for the hardware manufacturer. Microsoft can only include the drivers that vendors submit for WDM validation, anything else and it's up to the vednor to provide with their hardware or make available through their website.

Now for older devices it can be more of an issue (had a video card that AMD never released Win10 drivers for and a printer that Canon never released drivers for) because the manufacturers want you to go out an by new hardware for.

 

[Owain Taggart]

but that's a issue for the hardware manufacturer.

Well sure, but the manufacturer keeps selling it, when out of the box, it doesn't work. Doesn't get recognized properly. It's something the average user would have no clue to how to fix either. It's not like an outdated device no longer being sold that doesn't have drivers. It worked perfectly fine in Windows 7, and there's something weird obviously going on when you plug it in W10.

 

[Marc]

Well sure, but the manufacturer keeps selling it, when out of the box, it doesn't work. Doesn't get recognized properly. It's something the average user would have no clue to how to fix either. It's not like an outdated device no longer being sold that doesn't have drivers. It worked perfectly fine in Windows 7, and there's something weird obviously going on when you plug it in W10

Microsoft have changed the way drivers operate within Windows since Win7 in a bid to make things more secure as the it's been a threat vector in the past and older drivers more often than not won't work.

Hardware vendors should be aware of this made the changes though it's possible they simply don't want to update their packaging and simply hope people will visit their website.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Yep, that does sound like what's happening. I read up on it some, and it seems that even the drivers from the manufacturer's install package are being blocked. The average person is not going to be aware of what's going on and will feel SOL with something still sold on the market.

And as mentioned, the best workaround is to manually change the driver. Manufacturer has a bad habit of walking away from a product and still sell it.

 

[Santaman]

Drivers.. so much fun.. need Ethernet card driver! need to go online to get it but since I don't have a driver I can't go online.. AARGH!!!

 

[Haggis and tatties]

^^^Nothing will ever beat trying to load your, mouse, display, keyboard, soundcard, cd-rom, all in 640k in Dos, and god help you if your sound card was a SB awe 32, the drivers for that were just silly big and a nightmare to try and sqeeze in with your cd-rom drivers, two sets of drivers that were never mean't to share 640k. lol

 

[Santaman]

^^ I do remember.. loading all drivers into UMB.. and you had to load them in the right order or else one or even two of them wouldn't load into UMB leaving you with too little base memory..
I had one CD-ROM, a Philips i think, that had a little installer, it would add lines to config.sys and autoexec.bat so it would load high.. just that it kicked everything else out..

I do have a SB AWE 32.. it IS a magnificent card sound quality was great.

 

[Haggis and tatties]

^^^I remeber finding a stall at the local market that sold PD stuff, and one was a memory manager program, and it worked perfectly, that was the last time i ever manually tried to load drivers in Dos. lol

Of course once i sorted that issue out MS go and move the goal posts by bringing out W95, remember when dual Windows /Dos was the norm. lol

 

[Marc]

^^ I do remember.. loading all drivers into UMB.. and you had to load them in the right order or else one or even two of them wouldn't load into UMB leaving you with too little base memory..
I had one CD-ROM, a Philips i think, that had a little installer, it would add lines to config.sys and autoexec.bat so it would load high.. just that it kicked everything else out..

I do have a SB AWE 32.. it IS a magnificent card sound quality was great.

now what was the command for the autoexec.bat again?

Dos=high,umb
then
loadhigh=

config.sys I can't remember much from - just files= and buffers=

And before that we had programs like QEMM (Quarterdexk Extended Memory Manager) and dealing with extended and expanded memory.

 

[Santaman]

I am a tad rusty when it comes to configuring this sort of thing.. I should dig out the 386 one day and see.. 386 DX 20 with a seperate 387 co-processor and 2 Mb RAM.. SIPP not SIMM and a ISA VGA graphics card.

But yeah..
device=c:\dos\himem.sys
dos=high, umb
devicehigh etc etc
device=c:\dos\emm386.exe noems etc etc
buffers=30
files=40
stacks0,0

autoexec.bat
set temp = c:\tmp
prompt $p$g
path= etc etc etc
loadhigh c:\dos\mouse.com
etc etc

Yup veeeeeeeery rusty

and indeed we had QEMM and Memmaker later on, still will dig out the 386 to see how it worked in those days.

 

[Marc]

nd indeed we had QEMM and Memmaker later on, still will dig out the 386 to see how it worked in those days.

Quarterdeck also a product that brought crude multitasking to DOS - think it was called Deskview.

 

[John Clark]

^^^Nothing will ever beat trying to load your, mouse, display, keyboard, soundcard, cd-rom, all in 640k in Dos, and god help you if your sound card was a SB awe 32, the drivers for that were just silly big and a nightmare to try and sqeeze in with your cd-rom drivers, two sets of drivers that were never mean't to share 640k. lol

I had to keep separate floppy disks for some of the games as various ones did not quite fit in with others. (I probably still have some of them in the boxed up games)

 

[Random_Spock]

Windows f'd up again.

That's because yet another file-deleting bug has surfaced in Microsoft's Windows 10 Build 1809 update. The same update Microsoft pulled from public circulation because it was wiping entire user folders from existence. The new bug centers around Microsoft's Unzip application, and seems to present itself in two distinct forms.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasone...eting-bug-that-microsoft-missed/#2e914d166d8e

 

[Santaman]

I had to keep separate floppy disks for some of the games as various ones did not quite fit in with others. (I probably still have some of them in the boxed up games)

Yeah.. I also had a "game" floppy for some games, as barebones as possible but with sound card drivers and if needed CD-ROM drivers.

 

[StarCruiser]

Ahhh...those were the days...

I probably had two or three different specialized floppy disks (actually, per British English "stiffies") for odd configurations as well.

Never did find a perfect memory manager solution - they all had issues.

 

[John Clark]

I seem to remember the first C&C being the most awkward for some reason, though most of the Origin games needed it and one or two of the Microprose ones.

 

[Haggis and tatties]

^^^I remember Star Trek 25th anny wanting 560k of Conventional Memory and reporting i had something like 553k, and i saw it so much it is burned into my memory, funnily enough. lol

 

[Santaman]

Some games were a pain to get right, also soundcards, bloody IRQ7.. it would work but not if you had a printer connected to parallel port 1 which was also IRQ7 and some games refused to work with IRQ5, Plug and Play wasn't.. more like Plug and Pray that it didn't mess up.. yeah.. the good old days.

Think it usually was IRQ7 and DMA 5 for a soundcard..

 

[Marc]

Some games were a pain to get right, also soundcards, bloody IRQ7.. it would work but not if you had a printer connected to parallel port 1 which was also IRQ7 and some games refused to work with IRQ5, Plug and Play wasn't.. more like Plug and Pray that it didn't mess up.. yeah.. the good old days.

Think it usually was IRQ7 and DMA 5 for a soundcard..

Oh fuck yes inter-bloody-rupts for which you never had enough or had to shift things around.

Think there were 16 interrupts (0-15) and some you couldn't share or change around that much,
think ps/2 keyboar and mouse were on 1 & 2, 3 & 4 where com1 and 2, 5 generally available, 7 LPT1, 14 & 15 primary and secondary IDE

Don't forget there also port address that would have to set for some cards (NICs, Sound cards, SCSI & ESDI controllers)

And I remember some of the Microprose games. Dad like to play Silent Service (had to boot from the manufacturer supplied disk) and F-117

 

[Santaman]

Yeah.. IRQ's back in the day indeed not enough of them, also you'd have to watch which card you put in what PCI slot else they would step on each other's addresses, so you'd have to open the machine again and swap the NIC and the modem around or try another combination before the machine worked.