I hate Plug N Play *RANT*

edited July 2017 in Software
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:

Comments

  • So you like having to search forever to find out the hardware config if you lose your manual? And you like having to monitor and note physical switches?
    And you like having to resolve I/O conflicts manually?
    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!

    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.
  • So you like having to search forever to find out the hardware config if you lose your manual? And you like having to monitor and note physical switches?
    And you like having to resolve I/O conflicts manually?

    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.
  • I've had some problems with Plug-and-Play myself, but it's still a good feature. When it works, and it usually does, it's very nice. When it breaks however, it gets really, really annoying.

    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.
  • Later on, I may have to by myself a non-pnp sound card, prices don't seem too bad on ebay, but I have more pressing concerns at this point int time.
  • An older, non-PnP SB16 would be great. If you could disable PnP through the BIOS setup, that would be even better.
  • Yeah, no... I'll take PnP any day. Fuck doing that shit manually. The days of 3.x and having to figure out the settings for all of your hardware and getting everything to play nice together? Nope, don't miss that at all.
  • BigCJ wrote:
    An older, non-PnP SB16 would be great. If you could disable PnP through the BIOS setup, that would be even better.

    yes, I can set IRQ's and DMA's to "Legacy ISA".
  • Congratu-ma-frikkin-lations on discovering the true horrors of "Plug And Play".

    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.
    So you like having to search forever to find out the hardware config if you lose your manual? And you like having to monitor and note physical switches?
    And you like having to resolve I/O conflicts manually?
    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.
  • Of course, everything was better with a bus that could /actually/ autoconfigure. PC users were mostly unique in dealing with either PnP or manual-configuration hell.
  • >Someguy

    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.
  • The woes of "Generic PnP Monitor" even when you've installed your graphics drivers...
  • Graphics card =/= monitor. At least in most cases.
    You would need separate drivers for both. Assuming the monitor is snazzy enough to have its own.
  • I have never seen anything like that. Why would a monitor need it's own special driver?
  • Some high-end monitors have exclusive config options for the OS.
  • and that's the key thing, "high-end" no CRT monitor I have ever used required special drivers, or at least it didn't seem to matter.
  • Never seen that before. My favorite vintage monitors have all of their controls under the screen, a series of dials that can easily be adjusted without running some stupid config utility.
  • "Monitor drivers" were mostly just pre-made colour calibration and supported video modes - which the former wasn't too useful because settings can be adjusted and monitors age, and the latter where EDIDs solve the issue.
  • There was this one monitor I had. Win7 would be able to change its resolution to 1280x800 native (after installing the drivers) but on reboot it would say that the monitor was again a "Generic PnP Monitor" with a resolution of 1024x768. And I would need to install the drivers once again to get it to work.
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