Messing with SET BLASTER (port 220 IRQ 5 DMA 1) to get sound to work in "Rise of the Triad" was probably the defining moment of my early PC misadventures. That and making a boot disk for Dark Forces, and labelling it "boot dick" by accident (thanks for kicking me in the nuts, mum)

And you had to tweak the jumpers on your card, surely

Ludicrous gibs!

Dog mode

I'd name "Farting around with config.sys and autoexec.bat" among the things I enjoyed the most in my life. That's a pity you can't find a job to be paid for this nowadays...

Same here. Tweaking FILES= and BUFFERS= etc. in CONFIG.SYS and discovering DEVICE=ANSI.SYS enabled me to create custom DOS prompts with positioning and colours was a game changer and really what started me on the road to programming decades ago!

I loved tweaking AUTOEXEC.BAT so much that I created a front end menu shell which could be end user customised that at one stage became the de-facto program launcher for an entire state government here in Australia for a couple of years in the '80s.

Once you started moving up the chain with Win3, etc, throw in config.ini and program.ini amongst others. So many painful memories or is that nostalgia.

I still remember copying win.ini (IIRC) to recover a friend's PC where it had somehow gone missing.

BTW I have never actually installed (and never seen installation discs of) Windows before Windows 95 - we just copied it between PCs.

> So many painful memories or is that nostalgia.

The Greek roots of “nostalgia” translate as “the pain of returning home,” so it’s a false dichotomy. :)

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/nostalgia

Am I misremembering it as progman.ini or are those different files?

Eh? Ansible and other config tools are a modern iteration of the same. Devops is what you want.

And personally, I currently have a bad case of emacs configs.

I was telling my coworker the other day to think about how much of our lives we have wasted waiting for status bars to go from 0 to 100%, haha.

On top of it, most of that time was spent between 99% and 100%

Or, rather, between “100%” and “actually done”.

The worst for me was when you needed an extra 10KB to run a game after removing everything else and it was either no sound or no game

Did you install qemm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM) and use loadhi to try to move software into 'high memory' (where that would only work for some programs)?

I spent so many hours of my youth messing with that :) and this is one of those things where built up experience became completely irrelevant over time.

The debugging and problem solving skills will stay with you for life.

I think it’s actually the required persistence and tenacity which are the more valuable aquired traits.

One time I accidentally uninstalled the cd rom drivers while trying to clear enough space to play some Star Trek game.