I hate Plug N Play *RANT*
I like to run a lot of older software, and I have a fetish for Windows 3.1 and DOS, or older considering I'm running Windows 286/2.11 on the packmate III.
When I had my 486 before it bit the dust, I had a Sound Blaster 16 card, I didn't know what SB16 specifically but I didn't need too. I just installed the SB16 drivers and it worked just fine, of course the motherboard there was not plug n play.
However the motherboard on my solar is PnP, and it turns out my specific SB16 is a Vibra16 and is PnP.
When I went to install the drivers it said "configuration manager not found, please install configuration manager before installing software". So I had to go on a hunt to find this configuration manager, and I managed to find it on vogons, once I had it installed I could install my drivers successfully.
However, for some reason both DOOM and Duke3d will play music with my sound card, but not sound fx. I do suspect this has to do with it being plug n play, and managed by a utility.
I best you that if this was not a PnP motherboard or a PnP card, and you just needed to install the drivers and be done with it, I wouldn't be having this stupid problem.
It's so much easier to just install the drivers for our hardware and then be done with it, than having to use intermediate software to get your shit to fucking work!
Fuck PnP! :evil:
When I had my 486 before it bit the dust, I had a Sound Blaster 16 card, I didn't know what SB16 specifically but I didn't need too. I just installed the SB16 drivers and it worked just fine, of course the motherboard there was not plug n play.
However the motherboard on my solar is PnP, and it turns out my specific SB16 is a Vibra16 and is PnP.
When I went to install the drivers it said "configuration manager not found, please install configuration manager before installing software". So I had to go on a hunt to find this configuration manager, and I managed to find it on vogons, once I had it installed I could install my drivers successfully.
However, for some reason both DOOM and Duke3d will play music with my sound card, but not sound fx. I do suspect this has to do with it being plug n play, and managed by a utility.
I best you that if this was not a PnP motherboard or a PnP card, and you just needed to install the drivers and be done with it, I wouldn't be having this stupid problem.
It's so much easier to just install the drivers for our hardware and then be done with it, than having to use intermediate software to get your shit to fucking work!
Fuck PnP! :evil:
Comments
And you like having to resolve I/O conflicts manually?
Because you just described true pnp. In the early days, you didn't quite have the pleasure of the OS itself performing pnp I/O management duties.
It wasn't until Windows 95 when the OS was capable of managing pnp on its own.
Yes because if you do it manually, you can assign whatever you need too, but with this creative configuration manager, I can't. it only lets me choose form a few previous configurations. Just keep track of which card is using which I/O and such.
Sounds like many Packard Bells had PnP functionality. I have an Ess AudioDrive 1869 PnP soundcard on my PnP motherboard from Packard Bell. Because the configuration utility fails (and I don't know why), I can't enable the joystick port.
yes, I can set IRQ's and DMA's to "Legacy ISA".
The worst part is that if one did not have a PNP bios and needed to run an unsupported OS, or boot from a truly clean configuration, the hardware would be unusable. It is a little better with a PNP bios - you should be able to control the resource assignments from the BIOS setup, but not all BIOS might be as nice. I can't remember if you *still* had to run the SB configuration tool even with a PNP bios,
Oh, and the music component uses a separate OPL chip that is not PNP assigned, so it can still work. Look it up.
The better cards labeled their jumpers. The ones that didn't were indeed a pain. Even with PNP and PCI, you still had to monitor resources because many devices would not share resources. IRQ conflicts are even more annoying with PCI as the IRQ is tied to the physical slot, so you wind up having to physically re-arrange cards. So even with PNP it is often a manual process, the difference is when something goes wrong you *might* not have to open the case up.
I do agree with you there. PNP wasn't perfect, and as OP discovered, early pnp needed (sometimes poorly written) config utilities to manage it properly.
Still, it made life a bit easier. Sure as you said, I'd need to rearrange parts and muddle around device configs adding new parts occasionally, playing a guessing game at times but I'd still take that as an improvement over the ISA games. Less variables.
Assuming you don't buy generic chink garbage, most of the time things worked nicely and minimal labor required.
You would need separate drivers for both. Assuming the monitor is snazzy enough to have its own.