Vintage
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Remember when Star Wars Shadows of the Empire came out on PC and apparently, it's been awhile so maybe I'm not remembering correctly, but you needed a special card for your keyboard to play it?
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I thought sometimes they called them game ports (for the joystick.)
I reasoned if you are installing a sound card, you are probably doing some gaming, so it made sense to sort of bundle those together.
Its on the sound card because it's a midi port. Its designed for connecting a keyboard (as in electronic piano). Most people used it for gamepads but that's not what it was there for.
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There where three. The full din keyboard plug, serial for your mouse and that unholy thing on the back of your sound blaster on which you could connect a joystick.
Somewhere in my giant box of cables I have an adapter for attaching MIDI cables to the joystick port. When I actually used a MIDI keyboard with it, I had... variable success.
The first time I had a MIDI keyboard that just worked, it used USB as transport. (And it has worked great since. I think it's the only USB Mini plug device device I still regularly use.)
Crazy thing is, MIDI is absolutely ancient. You'd imagine it'd work fine on the gameports, but nope. Legacy PC ports are cursed. Except audio jacks and serial ports, and VGA if you're really into screwing things in place.
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PS2 keyboards use interrupts rather than polling in USB, meaning every time a key is pressed the CPU stops what its doing to process it.
And having to pick your IRQ when installing anything into your machine, and the weird bugs that could happen if you mucked it up.
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My brother in Christ, I also used this
And I'm 17
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The error message sounds bad, but it was actually a good thing. A better phrased error message might have been "Keyboard missing. Connect a keyboard and press F1 to continue." But, in the early days every byte mattered.
The system wouldn't work without a keyboard, and if you get further into the boot process you might not be able to shut down cleanly if you didn't have a keyboard attached. That error message gave you a chance to attach the keyboard, or to troubleshoot why the keyboard wasn't being properly detected (like the plug got bumped and wasn't making good contact anymore).
It was annoying when the lack of a keyboard was intentional. Like, you wanted to use the machine as a server. But, AFAIK you could disable this check if you knew the machine was going to be a server with no permanent keyboard attached.
I was always told that you shouldn't (dis)connect a keyboard when it was on because it could short circuit and fry something. This was before USB, of course.
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When was the last time you cleaned it out?
Earlier this week it stopped going up and down, only side to side. Had to clean some crap off the x-axis wheel.
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Earlier this week it stopped going up and down, only side to side. Had to clean some crap off the x-axis wheel.
Good stuff, was imagining a 30 year old mouse with 30 year old crud! 🤮
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wrote last edited by [email protected]
My keyboard still uses a PS/2 port via adapter. 1986 Model M, still clicky.
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Bitch
please.
(Kidding, you’re not a bitch and this isn’t a contest. But if it was…)
I think the coleco vision had that.
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Bitch
please.
(Kidding, you’re not a bitch and this isn’t a contest. But if it was…)
I still play my 2600.
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I remember a time when they weren't colour coded...
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I'm from Australia and I don't think I ever saw a flat ribbon cable there. The RF cables in Australia mostly use Belling-Lee connectors (that you just push in) rather than F-type like in the USA (that you screw in), and that's been a standard since the 1920s, so I don't think there's anything that predates it in Australia.
Australia does use F connectors for cable internet, but that's mostly a legacy network now.
Edit: Apparently Australia did use them and I'm just not old enough lol
We had flat ribbon. We used that exact unit for the atari. You screwed them into the back.
The typical ol' "garage" b&w tended to have them too, last tv i owned with one was this century
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And having to pick your IRQ when installing anything into your machine, and the weird bugs that could happen if you mucked it up.
I remember manually programming the cylinders and heads on a hdd into the bios. Kids these days got it easy
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Ps/2 ports predated the PlayStation 2 by years. Sony made naming confusing in this case.
How can ports of a game predate the platform itself? That makes zero sense.
(/s)
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What is that Acorn? I don't remember the BBC having an "Acorn Bus Extension", and it looks too narrow to be a Master...
(nm, I found it online: Acorn Atom. I've never seen one in real life.)
Yes, it was a nice little machine, the first computer I used at home. I shared it with some friends because our parents couldn't afford it unless we pooled our money. Each of us would have it for a week then take it to the next kid's house. In those days you had the option of buying it prebuilt or (cheaper) as a kit, and I still remember how excited I was when my dad and I came out of the electronics shop with a bag full of circuit boards, chips and keys that would magically become a computer when soldered together.
The Acorn story is really amazing: a tiny hobbyist company that got a break when the BBC commissioned the BBC micro from them, that went on to invent the ARM chips that are in billions of phones and other devices now.
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Those are just a combined port. You can use it for one or the other or use a splitter for both. The dual port was very popular on 90s laptops.
was very popular on 90s
This feels like you just called my PC old...
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Please,
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I remember manually programming the cylinders and heads on a hdd into the bios. Kids these days got it easy
And when the bits feel off the end and you had to wind them back on with a pencil.
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I'm fine., thanks.
