Something is missing from today's society.
Something deep.
Something primal.
Something I spent a huge chunk of my teen and pre-teen years engaging in.
During the early hours of the day, through the afternoon and often through the night.
Of course, I'm talking about setting up and configuring PC's.
You might say that kids today have it easy with their ready-to-go tablets,
their factory-served laptops and their automatically updating phones,
where the applications can be downloaded and installed in a click of a button.
But you're wrong.
Kids don't have it easy, they have it hard, and the reason for this is that
they're missing out on a valuable life principle.
That principle is that you have to work for what you want, you have to work damn hard,
and most of the time you have to learn a lot of new shit in the process.
You'll make mistakes, sure, but that's OK, because ultimately you'll persevere
again
and again
and AGAIN
until you eventually prevail and reach your goal!
This is the kind of experience, like say,
upgrading from Windows 3.11 to 95 brought,
or installing a new sound card and then trying for days to get the
IRQ and DMA settings to work properly with Doom!
It was often a painstakingly long process involving many breaks,
often just to play another game that you already got working.
It involved much effort, but ultimately when it was done a massive,
massive heap of satisfaction and delight was gained.
Once you got that damn piece of software to work, you used it, and you used it damn hard.
You didn't just flick it on, play with it for a few minutes, and then discard it like today.
You played it, even if it was shit.
Even if it was worse than flicking dog shit off the bottom of your trainers for four hours.
You played it!
And you damn well enjoyed it, even if it was just setting up the "Mystify" screensaver.
"Sorry mum, can't go for my tea. I'm waiting for a screensaver to activate so I can see the scrolling message."
Bliss.
Fucking bliss.
[inaudible]
Now, I was introduced to computers before the IBM PC compatible.
The Sinclair Spectrum broke me in with my first BASIC program when I was about five,
then the Commodore 64 came my way, followed by the Atari ST and the Amiga.
All of these machines possessed their own unique challenges, their own learning curves,
and indeed their own set of bespoke problems.
The thing with these machines however is that for the majority, they're closed units.
There's no real variance. All the systems are set up a particular way,
they are all designed to run a particular way,
and everything is tested to ensure it's compatible as can be across the entire range.
But, because PC's are built from an absolute hashtag,
different components from the disk drives down to the central processing unit, there's problems.
There is always problems.
Couple with this with the operating systems running different programs
designed to be compatible across various iterations and you have fuck-up heaven.
This was especially apparent before Plug-and-Play
and indeed in the early days of Plug-and-Play.
It was also exacerbated by the lack of Internet and drive availability.
If you didn't have disk, then you didn't have functionality,
or at least you had a distinct lack of functionality.
So, in a way, kids do have it easy today,
but I wouldn't trade my 90's experience of the PC for the world.
You can keep your damn tablets, regardless of the fact that I use one on a daily basis.
Whatever, don't judge me.
So here's a small selection of things that kids
just don't really get the joy of participating in nowadays.
BIOS configurations, setting time zones and actual times,
manually performing a dial-up connection to get on the internet,
driver setup, having disk, Blue Screens of Death (well, not as much anyway),
editing config.sys, autoexec.bat,
freeing up as much memory in DOS as possible, including loading drivers into high memory,
so the DOS games can only use the 640 kilobytes of standard RAM,
disk read sounds, IRQ port configuration, DMA allocation,
CD driver installation, mouse driver installation,
adding all this into the config.sys and autoexec.bat,
defining default paths, Encarta, Britannica, dot matrix,
scandisk, corruption, more corruption,
further corruption and additional corruption,
slowness (although operating systems today tend to be slower, if I'm honest),
guess work, no sound, PC speaker sound,
not being able to update or download drivers from the Internet,
problem solving without using Ask Jeeves or Alta Vista,
(they still remain search engines, right?).
But hey, it's not all bad. At least we don't have to wait for our computers to shut down.
So let's run through a typical process.
It's a process that I've recently endured whilst trying to recreate some 90's nostalgia,
a process where time seemed to disappear into a vortex.
Possibly not because I was enjoying it, but more because it puts you in a zone,
a zone of concentration, of suspense and intrigue indeed.
I experienced some things that put me right back in the 90's,
such as forgetting to eat until the task was done, and generally becoming dehydrated
until at least I got a working DOS prompt.
The goal I set out to achieve was to install a Windows operating system on a PC,
then install a few games and play them with sound
(and don't denounce the importance of a working sound card).
The plan wasn't for a specific Windows either.
As long as it was pre-XP, any Windows that would fucking work was absolutely dandy.
"An easy task", you may say.
Well...
Well..
Well, let me run you through, so that you can share in this experience,
and also bask in my deep, deep joy.
So step one is to get a working PC.
I had a Pentium II 333 with DOS 6.22 already installed which was handy.
So I decided to opt for the well implemented Windows 98 operating system to kick things off.
Being from the latter part of the last century,
thankfully this machine was able to boot straight from CD.
Something that wasn't even a reality in the mid-90's, so. I went about this straightforward task,
Windows 98 setup ran and failed, it ran again and failed.
I continued with this loop and finally came to the conclusion,
that something wasn't working.
The installation was complaining about some sort of memory allocation issue or something,
so I tried Windows 95, a risky choice as the machine was released several years after the ever-prone OS.
But hey! It installed, well, kind of. Several blue screens later and even with an attempt to upgrade from 95 to 98,
I gave up. This clearly wasn't the operating system or probably even the machine for me.
Thankfully I had another gray box I could use instead.
Now, having a spare PC was rarely an option in the 90's,
so if there was a major software or hardware issue, then you were pretty screwed.
Thankfully, it's 2015, so enter my Compaq Prolinea 486 DX4-100, a fine, fine machine.
The initial problem with this machine was that the floppy drive had literally fallen apart.
So after spending a bit of time forcing that back together, DOS installed successfully.
Then I proceeded to find out that the CD drive didn't work!
Give me strength!
So, out with the old and in with the new,
and whilst I was there I boshed in a Sound Blaster compatible ISA sound card.
Splendid!
Now on this occasion, I've had enough of Windows 95 and its latter incarnations,
so good old Windows 3.11 was order of the day and thankfully it installed without a hitch.
Superb.
Next, I needed to get sound functionality, but there was a problem.
My sound card's drivers were on CD.
This PC didn't have the drivers to use a CD-ROM drive,
so I had to search for depths of my old disk collection to find something appropriate.
After much searching between bouts of corrupt floppies,
I found a generic driver and opted to install it and install it I did, however the drive didn't function.
Jumper settings!
I hadn't changed the jumper settings. Off with the lid again and a quick amendment
from master to slave had the 48x beast operating.
I even connected the digital audio line to the sound card whilst I was there, allowing CDs to play
seamlessly through my PC speakers, like witchcraft!
The sound card drivers installed quite easily on DOS
and were pretty straightforward in Windows 3.11 as well.
Winner!
[CANYON.MID playing]
Step three was to find a working game.
I wanted to use my original software here,
so I searched for a suitable game and through various bouts of corrupted media, I discovered Duke Nukem 3D.
However, it didn't have any sound.
Various configuration and reconfiguration of the autoexec.bat and ingame settings however did yield results,
and soon enough Duke came alive "to kick some ass and chew bubblegum".
Next, I gave Syndicate a go,
however being an older game, it wasn't as straightforward.
You see, DOS games used to be limited to the 640 kilobytes of low-level memory
PCs used to have as standard. Anything above that is extended memory, which needs additional drivers
to make use of such as EMM386.exe,
but because Syndicate couldn't use that memory, I endeavoured to edit the DOS startup files
autoexec.bat and config.sys to unload as much unnecessary crap as possible.
This included the CD-ROM drivers I just installed and system files
such as country.sys, that tells DOS what type of keyboard you have.
Then I needed to find a DOS mouse driver, which I did, but it wouldn't install,
so I fell back to working at which files were necessary and then copy them over myself,
adding them manually into the autoexec.bat.
Syndicate then worked, but crashed so, moving on.
Space Hulk caused similar issues
and required changing the IRQ and DMA settings for the sound card
as the game itself lacked the ability to change the channels it used.
This meant editing the startup files again, rebooting again, trying again
and after several reboots and various memory hacks, the sound card worked.
Woo-hey!
[in-game music playing]
Other games were just... shit.
So then we come onto Windows and Windows 3.11 was actually the most straightforward of all the jobs.
It installed easily, the sound drivers installed easily,
and it happily made use of my monitor's SVGA resolution capabilities.
It wasn't as always straightforward as this back in the day,
but hey, on this occasion, winner! As for Windows 95 driver issues, well, that's a story for another day.
I feel that I must point out, that I've removed or condensed a lot of the steps involved in this process
and with troubleshooting time it took me the best part of the day.
So please share this video with your kids,
perhaps they'll see what joys they're missing out on or perhaps,
like I rediscovered,
they'll appreciate what a crock of stress-inducing shit
we had to go through just to play a game!
Herald modern times!
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Don't worry. It's just a finger flipping the bird, you filthy bastards.