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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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What a nightmare it was to have sound AND your CD drive drivers to load and leave enough memory for some of those nasty old DOS games. Felt like being a hacker.
(I might have realized I'm the old guy in the picture)
And that dedicated sound cable for DVD CD drive to your soundblaster
Oh wow. I totally forgot about those.
And if that cable's isolation was crap, you could hear your mouse movement through your speakers.
That also happened with the early onboard sound cards.
I built a config.sys file with a menu that then passed the menu choice on to autoexec.bat so I could choose at boot time between 3 configurations- one with expanded memory for older games that required it, one with extended memory for everyday use and newer games, and one with everything extra (including CD-ROM drivers) stripped away to maximize free conventional RAM for the one or two games that needed that...
How could you have a menu in config.sys?? I wasn’t aware that was even possible.
I don't remember at this point... So I googled, this looks familiar: http://smallvoid.com/article/dos-multiple-configurations.html
That’s crazy. It’s like some ghetto DOS version of grub.
I know that was a thing and I tried to get it done, but never managed to get it to work properly. So back to manual configuration and rebooting it was.
But I like to think that's how I learned how my PC works and what it does when doing so, which helped me identify the cause of many issues over the years.
Sound typically (*) didn't require "drivers" or any TSR though. The game had to do all the hardware control itself.
It was usually enough to set a BLASTER variable to point it at the correct IRQ, DMA and memory address, and perhaps run a program at boot to initialize the card and set volume levels, but no TSR eating up memory.
(*) Some exceptions are later soundcards of the Win 9x era that did crappy emulation of a real Soundblaster via a TSR in DOS.