Thread 12039715

What was retro PC building and gaming like? Were PATA/IDE/EIDE Hard Disk Drives really that bad?

I never had any issues with hard drives. Sometimes a game wouldn't work if you had a particular kind of graphics card or something. I remember the first time I got a graphics card with a fan on it, I thought it was super impressive that the graphics card needed its own fan. It was a 9600xt.

>>12039715 (OP)
It was a pain in the ass because you had to set jumpers for IRQs and base addresses on every card (sound, modems network etc) and serial and parallel ports in the BIOS to avoid IRQ conflicts dispite that the cards were cool. IDE was fine, the big boom was when people started fittinng soundcards and CD roms. There were no real hassles around cooling. If you had legacy cards that sill had IRQ jumpers and they went in PnP systems and you did not set things up right you got bluescreens.

>>12039715 (OP)
TLDR
There was no plug and play.
Shit very often did not play well together because of conflicts ules you moved plastic pegs around on the cards so it was one happy family. Every driver had to be manually installed.

>>12039715 (OP)
IDE was easy, but you often had to set your hard drive order with jumpers.

Hard drives didn't last pissing time. Lost so many memories to those fuckers.

>>12039751
The wide range of port specification, RAM types, clock speeds, clock multipliers, and how quickly they and many other compatibility issues of hardware changed was a big headache.

I had forgotten how many versions AGP slots went through until thinking about it just now.

Hardware interoperability improved a lot after the Socket A and Socket 370 era.

>>12039751
Microsoft utterly hated the idea of hardwired allocators, and wanted them gone as quickly as possible.
Jumpers/switches for IRQ/DMA config were the main target of the PnP spec.
Can't say I disagree, they were a massive annoyance.

>>12040297
>Can't say I disagree, they were a massive annoyance.
It bears pointing out to anyone not part of the era that it wasn't a simple case of making sure everything had its own IRQ and DMA channel. What you could set them to was limited by first the card design, you might want to set your sound card to 11 but you probably can't and even if you could chances are half your games simply wouldn't let you configure them to support it.
Not only that but the number determined the pecking order for priority. Sound blasters were latency sensitive what with being cheapshit DACs with no real buffering so if you have it set to IRQ7, it'll be pre-empted by anything on IRQ5 more often leading to audio dropouts. If you move your parallel port to 7 and use 5 you'll get better audio but now your parallel port printer/scanner/zip drive gets slightly less reliable due to shitty race conditions in software.
Things got better when DOS/win9x went away and windows got a kernel more suitable for timely interrupt handling. And then with the advent of USB many devices went polling rather than interrupt driven and sound cards operated with RAM buffers that kind blew out the latency, but it was generally preferred to pops.

>>12039715 (OP)
the cases were sharp as fuck inside which combined with those molex power connectors meant i cut myself more than once

>>12039715 (OP)
Building the computers were fun as ever, a challenge to figure out how to maximize a limited budget for features you'd desire. I remember the first HDD I had was 40MB (not even GB) in my 286-12, and later getting an additional 80MB HDD from Best Buy's computer section. The manuals of the drive walked me through setting the jumper on the new drive as a slave to the master 40MB IDE one. When I was building my Windows 2000 machine, I remember I opted to skip IDE and go for an Adaptec 29160 SCSI controller card, to forego larger HDD capacity for speed, as the HDDs were 15000rpm drives. Going SCSI I remember needing a terminator at the end of each chain, and since the Plextor optical drives and super fast Seagate HDDs had different pinouts, utilizing both chains, it was a cable management nightmare. I remember the case had almost no breathing room and was bad airflow with all those different cables, especially when I gave in and added in IDE drives as DVD drives were brand new without a SCSI equivalent at the time. I thought the speed was great and it was basic enough a young me still understood well enough.

>>12039715 (OP)
>Were PATA/IDE/EIDE Hard Disk Drives really that bad
Not really. Their ribbon cables were a little bit annoying, and you had to set the master/slave jumpers properly so that drives got assigned the right letters, but they weren't that bad. Molex power connectors could definitely be a pain though.
>>12040426
I still cut myself working on newer PC cases occasionally, but definitely not as much as on old cases.

>>12039715 (OP)
Well how "retro" are you talking? Because that motherboard is from the mid-2000s and by that point PC building was pretty much the same as it is today. Some of the retarded old boomers in here are talking about IRQ conflicts and setting jumpers, but that was more than a decade earlier. Pretty much from the Windows 95 era onwards PCs were glorified Lego just as they are now. IDE drives were no more difficult to work with than a modern drive, bar the task of trying to cable manage huge ribbon-style cables (but nobody gave a shit about cable management back then anyway).

You just kinda stuck em together and then lugged it about when the opportunity arose

>>12040324
>IRQ 11
Several older games didn't even have an option for IRQ above 7.

>>12039751
>soundcards
I forgot about those. There actually was a time when a PC couldn't do good audio beyond a weak midi .wav. I remember playing FF8 on a 1997 PC without a soundcard and how terrible it sounded. The cut scenes sounded fine, but the in-game music was a stripped-down mess. Better sound quality that's standard in a PC is something people take for granted now.

>>12039869
They were deliberately shitty because people assumed that you'd upgrade within a year when the capacity doubled. So there was no focus on building better long-lasting ones. HDDs didn't become long-lasting until around the 500GB capacity mark when lots of people started keeping their computers longer.

>>12039751
Everything was a pain in the ass. You had to manually set up routers, ports, and all sorts of other shit for everything you added to it. It took me the better part of a whole day to configure the broadband MODEM card when broadband first became available in my area. Printers were the same way, too.

I don't think people realize how convenient having everything be "plug-and-play" is now.

>>12040989
You probably had onboard sound card otherwise the only sound option would have been PC speaker

>>12040995
He probably did. Realtek stuff was absolutely shit until the 1200-something series. A 700 or 800 series with the tired old AC'97 codec was barely better than 1980s era AdLib.
At the time, I had an Abit AN7, with nVidia's (yes, that's how it was written back then) Soundstorm integrated soundchip. Which remained the best integrated soundchip for something like 10 years after it got discontinued.

>>12041012
That's one of the best socket 462 motherboards. All japanese rubycon caps

>>12041015
I have an NF7 in an XP box I threw together for the funny after finding a cheap FX 5700 with a comically oversized aftermarket cooler on it. That board's an absolute treat to work with considering the era it's from, at least from a software standpoint. Some of the connector placements on it are a bit retarded.

>>12041029
stop living in filth, anon. you can do better.

>>12041046
Believe me first thing I did back when I took this photo was get the microfibres out. Nothing calls attention to how dusty your shit is more than taking a photo of it.
I'm not pulling the card out the computer to get a nicer photo of it however so this one keeps getting used.

>>12041029
Have you broken into my house and stolen my old shit? I had a very similar Arctic Cooling Silencer on my old x1650.

>>12041050
A couple of OEMs simply used those Arctic coolers as well. That design really got around back in the day.

>>12039715 (OP)
There was no such thing as "gaming PCs" until like the late 2000s. Most games weren't all that demanding to begin with because they were made for the average PC of the time in mind. Gaming PCs became a necessity after XBox 360 and PS3 were launched in 2006, which upped the standards much higher than the PS2 era. And especially after Crysis (2007). That's when the arms race for "muh realistic grafix" and "but can it run Crysis bro" started, over good gameplay and story. And now we're in the women have a penis and men can have babies era of gaming.

>>12041090
You weren't even a zygote in yo momma's womb, back when hard niggas was runnin twin Voodoo 2s on heavily overclocked Mendocino Celerons.

A week ago, I purchased a Dell Optiplex 760 SFF with 4GB RAM, a 500GB HDD, and a Core 2 Duo E8400. I've also purchased a Radeon HD 7750, a PS/2 and serial port, multi-card reader, and a XE power supply, the latter two I'm still waiting to arrive. All of this, so I can have a DX9 XP machine to play around once in a while.

>>12041090
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, faggot. Stop LARPing.

>>12041586
That should do fairly well, the 7750 is about on par with the older 4870 as far as I know which was a damn good card in its day.

>>12041693
I was also considering the Geforce GT 740, but I feel AMD is treating me better than Nvidia. My only major concerns now is storage, heat, and the PS/2 add-on. I can either rely on SD cards, reformat a 1TB drive I have lying about, or invest in a PCI USB 3.0 card. The small internal volume has me a bit worried on temps, but I'm not afraid of modifying the case. And I'm not sure if the PS/2 add-on would be compatible, considering it's made for the later series, and it came with a full size plate, meaning I have to do some "fabricating".