That’s how I learned DOSSHELL back in the day. I had a 10 disk holder that was usually full that had different boot disks for different games, and sometimes I would take the time to make little menus.
The Mac equivalent was some mix of messing with Extension loading order (which could be wacky, and the usual first step was "Disable all the wacky stuff you don’t really need first) combined with manually setting memory partitions per application (You could ‘Get Info’ for an application and say that Photoshop (for example) would use 4 megabytes of ram, or 8 if you had the extra to spare… And it would be restricted to this. Photoshop basically ran it’s own ‘scratch files’ for VM space if it couldn’t work in the partition you set).
This is, of course, all useless knowledge these days.
I think the skills learned looking for this stuff and the patience it took to try a million variations to get a game running are still with me.
I don’t miss those days. But whenever some Gen Z know it all starts mouthing off I’ll drop this on them. As well as IRQ and DMA channel jumpers.
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I’ve had to mess with jumpers in semi-recent memory. I think we had some involved in some low-level troubleshooting of routers a couple years back. Maybe the on-board UCS cards, which are basically mini PCs shoved into a router module.
Yeah but when was the last time you had to manually set the IRQ jumper on your sound card?
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Oh man. Okay. Wait. I actually know this. September 1995, according to my inbox, because I had an angry bitchy conversation about having to change the IRQ on my Gateway 2000 computer’s non-plug-and-play OEM sound card.
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I always used to upgrade my sound card well beyond reasonableness, Sound Blaster Audigy and 16bit and all that crap. Getting those dang things to work was always entertaining.
Paying $140 for a sound card and having it not work was agreat anger making thing.
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You still have emails from 25 years ago*? I thought I was a pack rat 
* Yes, 1995 was 25 years ago. I’m having a lot of trouble getting my head around that 
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I have never had to set a sound card IRQ.
Yeah, I’m That Guy™. I keep every email i’ve ever sent or received (except for spam). Sometimes it’s useful if i need to remember some trivial life detail from 20 years ago 
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Not technically related, but:
New X-Wing game, but from EA. Early guesses suggest it will have limited scope (5 x 5 battles), some sort of ‘grind’ mechanics to unlock stuff, and probably be more ‘arcade’ than ‘sim.’
So still over here playing TIE Fighter currently. (While I prefer the ‘good guys’ the missions in TIE fighter are much better balanced to be less frustrating… XvT is a bit too multiplayer, which I expect this new game may be as well.)
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Sounds a lot like EVE: Valkyrie…
Seen that before. “I’ve watched one preview for a movie and now I know who the villain will be and everything about who they are and why they’re doing it, even though they were in the preview for five seconds.”