You’d plug your mouse into the serial port and your scanner into your printer port. Wild times.
Wtf is that top font? Those bitch ass letters are going too low.
I remember this, but I also remember never actually managing to get a serial port gamepad or joystick to work in Windows. Only DOS.
Game port (specifically on a SoundBlaster32). But isn’t it also a serial port? That’s just what I’ve always referred to with any plug that was just a rectangle full of little pins and not PS/2 or USB lol
No, a game port was a 15-pin connector, while serial ports were either 9- or 25-pin.
Isa sound blaster with upgradable additional memory sodimms
Sound cards used to take up one of the few slots so they’d also have a joystick port since the people buying sound cards were often doing it for games.
I remember buying the Sound Blaster card and “upgrading” my ram for a pretty penny so I could play wing commander.
Soundblaster.
Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time.
Did joysticks actually use MIDI or they just use the same port? You can program so many buttons with MIDI. You could set up an entire cockpit on one device.
They were separate hardware protocols. Thanks to the pinout, the port would get used in different ways depending on what’s plugged in. In theory you could have both midi in/out devices and a joystick plugged in at the same time.
More here: https://www.mikesflightdeck.com/interfacing/gameport.html
That’s nifty. If I understand this, the advantage of a joystick using game port instead of MIDI is much simpler hardware. The game port seems like a sort of ADC which means the joystick needs only very simple analog components. A midi joystick would need those same analog components, plus its own ADCs and some digital logic for midi comms. Without the need in most games for dozens of axes and buttons, the extra cost and complexity wouldn’t be worth it.
I did find this though, if someone has midi stuff and wanted to go wild. https://github.com/c0redumb/midi2vjoy