The reason I mentioned those was that there were certain games back in the old days that needed lots of tweaking of things to work.
Wing Commander I'm looking at you
The reason I mentioned those was that there were certain games back in the old days that needed lots of tweaking of things to work.
Wing Commander I'm looking at you
I was more into war and flight sims, with Harpoon, Red Baron II, Fighting Steel, Silent Service and anything that Microprose made that flew. I still have Fighting Steel, which runs just fine on my Win7 Thinkpad. I never played WC.
Yep. My boxes for those probably still have the floppy in for them too.
Seem to recall Command and Conquer being a pain too.
The Amiga A500+ seemed easier at the time (and I had a 40mb HD for that too) but I got used to messing around more with the pc.
Command and Conquer was indeed a bit of a pain.. one trick we used later on was to start up Windows 95 which loaded drivers etc in good order and then fall back to DOS, the Win95 drivers were just a teensy smaller than the DOS versions and C&C worked with that, when booting up to DOS alone it was a pest, you had to load drivers and TSR's in exactly the right order or else no go.
Can't remember which game it was but it demanded 629KB of conventional memory... now THAT was a puzzle to get right, no CD drivers, the smallest and crudest mouse drivers and older Soundblaster drivers because these were also smaller..
Can't remember which game it was but it demanded 629KB of conventional memory... now THAT was a puzzle to get right, no CD drivers, the smallest and crudest mouse drivers and older Soundblaster drivers because these were also smaller..
Funny how times have changed, 4 classic C&C titles are now Free/Open Source.
Soundblaster was so fiddly. It needed attention constantly. I don't miss all that one bit. Remember saving for more or faster RAM or a graphics card that would fit into the one available slot after the FDs & CD took the rest and wouldn't be obsolete in four years..
I seem to remember being charged £100 for an extra 4mb of memory when I started out. 
The fun of limited interrupts and address spaces.
Ironically while we no longer have to deal with those limits, design of modern boards and processors and their limited number of PCIe lanes is almost as big a headache.
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Those are artificial limitations imposed by the manufacturers.
They could give us more, but they won't until pushed by consumers.
So much of the BoM (Bill of Materials) cost wasted on superficial RGB decorations & fancy coloration/graphics on the MoBo that don't add to performance.
They're not entirely artificial, yes you can have more lanes but the difficulty to keep signal integrity will make it MUCH more expensive, to cut it very VERY short, you need a bigger everything, bigger socket, with more pins/islands, more mainboard layers, more everything, so yeah, you can get it, but it will cost ya, go HEDT you want more lanes you get a 1000 buck mainboard and a 4000 buck processor oh and since they have quad channel memory banks you need at least 4 dimms as well.
So, do you actually need more lanes? Multi GPU is dead and deader and really dead, most users have 2 drives, not more, so what do you need more lanes for? Server? nah, NAS, most users do not make their own server.
So yeah for old hackers and techheads it's never enough
but for 90+ % of the computer users it doesn't matter.
So, do you actually need more lanes? Multi GPU is dead and deader and really dead, most users have 2 drives, not more, so what do you need more lanes for? Server? nah, NAS, most users do not make their own server.
So yeah for old hackers and techheads it's never enough
but for 90+ % of the computer users it doesn't matter.
I loved the Windows 10 Start Menu. First I removed all of the active tiles -- I didn't want any of that nonsense -- and I pinned all of my app shortcuts to it, plus shortcuts to local and shared folders. Basically, I turned it into a GNOME overview or a Rofi launcher for Linux, and then eliminated all of my shortcuts on the desktop.
I don't like the Windows 11 Start Menu at all.
^ I thought the W11 start menu was more or less the same as 10's? I don't use the default, so I don't see it most of the time unless I hit a key by mistake.
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