What are IRQ, DMA & Address Ports? - Soundcard Memories [Byte Size] | Nostalgia Nerd
Vložit
- čas přidán 27. 05. 2024
- If you owned an IBM Compatible PC during the 80s or 90s then you'll likely know the ordeal of setting up peripherals such as Sound cards. Before diving into a game, you had to make sure that it was setup to recognise your Soundblaster or Adlib card. This was done through an I/O Port address, an IRQ and a DMA channel. This video explores exactly what these things are, how they relate to your PC and why Plug & Pray was introduced to make our lives easier.
*Please consider supporting the channel on Patreon*: www.patreon.com/nostalgianerd...
You'll find exclusive rewards, early access, monthly boxes and a whole lot more on offer there.
☟Sharing☟
If you wish to share this video in forums, social media, on your website, *please do so*! It helps tremendously with the channel!
☟Subcribe☟
czcams.com/users/nostalgi...
✊Support Me! ✊
*Please consider supporting the channel on Patreon*: www.patreon.com/nostalgianerd...
Visit my eBay Shop: ebay.to/1QQpYyy
Buy From Amazon (Amazon give a small commission to my affiliate account): AMAZON UK - amzn.to/2sTOsRW
★Join me on Social Media★
Twitter: / nostalnerd
Face: / nostalnerd
Instagram: / nostalgianerd
Web: www.nostalgianerd.com
★Equipment★
Lumix G6 with Vario 14-42mm Lens
Nikon D3200 with 40mm Macro
Corel Video Studio Ultimate X9
Corel Paint Shop Pro X6
Blue Snowball Microphone
♜Resources♜
Music is all from CZcams's audio library and is attribution and royalty free;
1. The Last Day
2. Juicy
3. Far Away
"Simm Memory" clip uploaded via. an education CD-ROM, and available at • Video
If you believe I have forgotten to attribute anything in this video, please let me know, so I can add the source in. It takes time to make these videos and therefore it can be easy to forget things or make a mistake.
![Why does DOS use 8.3 Filenames? [Byte Size] | Nostalgia Nerd](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/eGIyCD2_qA8/mqdefault.jpg)
![Why does DOS use 8.3 Filenames? [Byte Size] | Nostalgia Nerd](/img/tr.png)
I'm so glad we don't need to deal with port and IRQ conflicts any more. Thanks for reminding me of the nightmares we used to face. =P
Agreed. But I do miss the skill level you needed to build up in order to be able to run DOS software successfully!
Right? It's nice to see how far we've come, from manually setting jumpers, addresses, and various other shit to seamless plug & play everything
I never found all this stuff complicated, just down what was already being used and configure your new devices accordingly.
I have to agree it's nice to not have to deal with a lot of that now, but after awhile it became easier as I kept a hand written list on a note pad in my desk draw of what IRQ when to each device in my computer like my Sound Blaster, Modem, 10/100 network card, etc.. so I if I had to replace, or upgrade something after nearly pulling my hair out doing my first 2 386 builds with DOS 6.1 and Windows 3.1 as a kid having come from the C64, and Apple II IE machines.
Nostalgia Nerd that's what I was gonna say just having the knowledge of primitive complexity vs. Let the cpu do everything now for me... the real configuration is plug and pray.. trying new ports...( $quare biz fun) imagine toddlers in mid 2000s playing video games saving to 2mb 4mb memory cards... I hear the complaints on 2tb hdd'$ not being large enough for 30 40 gigabyte games easily sent to the clouds mite I add....
That was excellent! I miss those days to be honest. Everything was locked in once you configured your cards and it was transparent. No funny business going on in the background. I always kept my system quite simple and had little issues. Disabling unused resources on the IO controller like printer port or second com port helped a lot.
PhilsComputerLab Many thanks Sir Computer Lab, I've been enjoying your high RPM hard drive videos recently. It was a time when everything was just more understandable, and we were made to understand. It's a shame everything is so glossed over now.
Nostalgia Nerd this is actually my favorite computer channel. Every upload is a celebration.
If you mean PhilsComputerLab, good choice. If you mean me, many thanks!
I can't imagine setting up each and every USB-device manually .....
Nostalgia Nerd no i mean you. You make complicated things simple.
OOOOooo.... I remember having to deal with DMA and IRQ channels when I was a kid. I dont know the exact details but since I was like 10-11 years old when games like Duke Nukem 3D and Rise of the Triad came out, I didnt know what they were, I just fiddled around with them until they worked. Maybe this is why it was so fickle. :)
Now 20 years later, I kind of sort of understand how DMAs and IRQs work. Maybe. Mind you I'll still choose the "sound blaster" option when configuring the sound for old DOS games because that's what made the sound for these old DOS games work when I was a kid, so its safe to say that by now its like the standard for Windows 7. :P
Good video
Loved this ! Reminded me of my first "sound card" and ESS Audio Drive 1688 in my dad's 486 DX2/66
A220,5,1,5
Still remember after all these years the port config for an SB Pro!
This is one thing with new computers I don't miss. IRQ errors or having to shut your damn computer down to fix your mouse keyboard issues.
For a DOS build, I often look specifically for non-pnp parts, just to stay in full control of all IRQ and DMA channels. Back in the 90s I didn't know as much about how it worked so I ran into trouble too. Especially with some weird combo cards.. like a sound card and modem in one.
Watching this, as I unbox my eBay Sound Blaster 2, it just hit me why I lobe these old things. The knowledge, the learning curve. It is so much more fulfilling than building a modern rig.
Glad I didn't HAVE to grow up with this tho 😂
Awwww man... those days suuuuucked! You probably should have just tossed in Kernel conflicts as a freebie of nightmares in the 90s. Also your bit at the end made me lol, good one!
Trivia addendum to the IRQ stuff: aside from priority, interrupts are also distinguished as maskable or non-maskable, which determines whether a higher-priority interrupt can override a lower-priority one if the latter has already begun executing.
As the video says, an interrupt causes the CPU to dump its current instruction pointer and register contents into a cache and load the interrupt handler, service the interrupt, then reset the registers and instruction pointer and resume whatever it was doing when the interrupt came. Now, if the CPU is in the middle of working on a priority 3 interrupt and suddenly gets a priority 1 interrupt, it checks the value of a certain bit in the priority 3 interrupt and depending on the result, either tells the priority 1 to wait for its turn despite its higher priority, continues working on the priority 3 until finished then greenlights the priority 1, or pauses the priority 3, does the priority 1 immediately, then resumes the priority 3.
With today's clock speeds, being forced to wait for another interrupt to finish usually doesn't mean much delay, but if a high-priority interrupt were to do something that needs an ongoing low-priority one to finish, it would deadlock the system if the high-priority interrupt gets precedence.
now days its all software interrupts on windows from other processes ruining my realtime audio fun :(
Great video and I mean all of them. Love your content and delivery. Thanks!
Absolutely love these vids, so informative but in a very relaxed way - no intense training or pressure. Have you thought of doing a spin-off series of sci-fi nerd or something for cutting edge IT technology but in the same casual and enjoyable fashion?
Anyone who finds this nostalgic clearly was never the LAN leader in multi-PC setups at gaming days. I used to spend HOURS getting everyone's PCs working with LAN cards (most people didn't own them, so we'd have to install new or loaner cards). More often than not I wouldn't get to play because of this. It was fun, but bloody painful!
Aaaah that DUKE3D setup screen brought back some memories haha
Your soundcard is working perfectly
Pressing the "caddy eject" on a CD-Rom/DVD-Rom drive will still generate an IRQ. This is a handy way of getting out of frozen programs when the ctrl-alt-del will not work. Nifty hack to know, it works more often than not...
Really good to have these explanations ;)
God, remembering this let me love my Windows 10 PC ten times more. :)
All the hassle with IRQ, DMA and the different RAM Spaces for drivers in DOS.. Don't miss my config.sys really.
And those jumpers, Floppy and IDE cables. Figuring out all that stuff on you own basically, without the internet to guide you.
Now almost every thing runs out of the Box, with Windows getting the drivers itself via Update.
Also PCs don't crash or die due a failed fan anymore, because everything is monitored and smart in itself nowdays.
Awesome video, brings back memories of getting my ASound Gold ISA sound card(sound blaster 16 clone with Yamaha XG midi) to work in DOS, windows 3.1, and later Windows 95 I learned quickly to write all my IRQ and jumper settings down on paper after I figure out what worked, and did not work. Edit: just pulled out the 2 CD driver disk I have for the later PCI versions of those cards, and I'm going threw the sweet Midi demos on them that play great with my Asus Xonar DG PCI sound card in Wndows 10 LOL!
The Computer Man has been my ring tone for a couple years!
Great content, nice and informative while clear and uncluttered, unlike my desktop
5:25 Polling is pronounced "pole-ing", as in polling station
My flat mate had only ever read the word "debut" and we were watching football one night and he comes out with "It's his D-BUTT tonight!"
Did you watch that episode of 999, presented by Michael Buerk where some lad got a javelin through his neck? I'm pretty sure that's "Pole-ing"
Ah, I remember 999. Gave me nightmares as a kid! Would that not be more "skewering" though?
But, NN, you have to admit, Ghelyar is correct. I was about to say the same thing.
Lol I thought I was alone thinking it was pronounced wrong.
This was excellent, thanks!!!
Bought back lots of memories... mainly bad ones!
Phillips CDI Palm Springs Golf there. Nice. A game you can play within that game, is Spot The Rake in the sandtraps. : )
I both miss the days of poring over my config.sys and autoexec.bat configurations and am also incredibly glad those days are over. People who get started with computers these days have no clue just how much harder they were to use back in the day. Getting enough memory for Doom, a SoundBlaster AND mouse drivers on top of that... I always ended up turning to Memmaker.
Great channel, thank you for subtitles!
You are most welcome.
I miss those days, I loved the challenge of getting reputedly difficult combinations set up.
The killer was the low DMA channels 0-3, and in the AT and above era where DMA 0 was no longer needed for memory refresh, if one card offered it, it saved the day.
The Floppy controller was always on #2, so unless a device did offer #0, you could struggle.
Typical devices that needed a low DMA (0-3) . there was never a problem with high DMA (4-7), were:
Sound card (typ #1, often the one device that could take #0))
LPT port in EPP/ECP (typ #3)
Network card
Scanner interface card
SCSI or other interface cards
Ah, the good old days, my tactic for the really tough ones was to prepare a "cheat sheet", listing things with their resources in order of flexibility... absolute requirements first, going down to devices that had the widest choice. For some particular combinations, the DMA day was saved by one device allowing DMA 0 (formerly memory refresh, but available on 286 or better - and yes, the high DMAs were available too but there were never that many devices competing for them.
DMA 0 - formerly memory refresh, latterly available but a rare option on devices
DMA 1 - first choice of pretty much everything!
DMA 2 - floppy controller
DMA 3 - the usual backup selection of devices
Competing... Sound card, Network card, Old scanner cards, LPT1 in ECP/EPP mode
Smart comparison!
Reminds me on debugging microcontrollers, Seriously yu can see every part of the memory, it's address and it's value. So you can directly see what is in the ram. Seriously that is quite awesome, unduable with higher levels of programming on higher machines but damn that is something that really give you a feel for the thing.
Learning about how computer components cooperate teaches me about how humans cooperate. Fascinating!
I think I spent my whole time gaming in my youth not knowing what these acronyms meant or did. Just played around with the numbers/accepted the defaults. 😂
One bit of nostalgia I can live without
didnt know irq or dma channels when i was a kid. but i know randomly choosing them would eventually make duke work
I remember the days or IRQs and running out of them and trying to get the joystick plugged into the midi port on my sound card working. Getting things working was, at times, more interesting than the games themselves.
Your sound card works perfectly! - Warcraft 2 . . . .
HMI module alpha-humana on approach to space station Mercury.
I remember as a kid trying so hard to install C&C Red Alert. If only I knew more I wouldn't have had to guess all DMA and IRQ combos to make the sound work.
It's worth noting that not all cpu architectures have a concept of ports. It is very common to map peripherals to memory addresses instead, memory mapped IO. I know that the GBA and original NDS consoles do this, I suspect that more recent ARM based devices do as well but have not had any reason to look into it.
A lot of home computers like the Amiga used memory mapped IO as well. (They also used DMA to do memory to memory transfers to do things like create hardware sprites. Leaving the CPU to do other work instead of it having to actually drawing the sprites pixel by pixel.)
(For those who don't know: A sprite is the name for an ingame object like the character you control or the enemies you have to evade/shoot.)
hahaha awesome!!! all this old stuff to explain how it worked :)
The one thing that I found more frustrating than IRQs, DMAs, and address ports was the crappy PNP management software that always refused to configure devices they way I wanted. Windows and it's device manager made things a bit more tolerable though ...
Talk about back in the day. I remember when it was good to know base 2 and 16.
Those derpy faces creep me out. XD
Well done. ;p
the background music is so cool that i couldn't understand the topic :P
Ugh ... the bad old days!
I remember setting up warcraft's sound by trial and error and never remembering to write down the settings that worked. Not having to go through all that business is glorious. You kids don't know yer born!
True That!! Ad-lib, direct sound, or if very lucky you had a Soundblaster 16!
I remember doing that a few times during my first 2 386 builds(one for myself, and other the family computer) back in the day as a kid trying to get sound to work on a SB 16 clone card(ASound was the brand if i remember correctly), so after that I started to keep a written list of what IRQ went to what device, and what jumper settings did what on my motherboards, and man did that save a lot of time.
And then you got the issues that you can't use your sound card and your printer port at the same time.
No wonder majority of gamers gravitated to consoles.
PLEASE, MAKE A PART 2 AND GO DEEEPER. I'm currently studying peripherals in one of my computer science courses.
That's what she said (that doesn't even really make sense). In all seriousness, it's unlikely that I'll follow this up with anything more in depth. I like to keep them "Byte Size" to avoid getting bogged down.
Do a megabyte sized episode about this.
Nostalgia Nerd
Oh, no problem. I still love you.
Thank you for replying.
These DMAs, IRQs and others were always black magic for me. :P
Never understood this as a kid. Anyway I remember always selecting IRQ 5 and DMA 1 for Sound Blaster when setting up (SETUP.EXE) most MS-DOS games my computer back then. That always worked, buy I think I arrived to those values by trial and error.
Reminds me of having to set up each sound card by hand for every single game in DOS. Good old AWE.
Plug and Pray indeed! Just had to disable PnP Aware OS on my MMX's bios and then change the ethernet card on pci slot 2 to irq 12 to make the sound card work properly! Whatever is up with this M571 board, it doesnt like giving an IRQ to the VGA and the sound card at the same time. Or maybe its because of the network card but in any case it took me waaaaaay more time that it should have to figure this out!
What are IRQ, DMA & Address Ports?
Brancasm beats me.
Brancasm Kid in 2037 : "What is usb, apps and touch screens?"
Interrupt ReQuest, Direct Memory Access, communications port.
Universal Serial Bus, mobile applications, resistive / capacitive input device.
The first is your teacher poking you with a ruler so you can pay attention to her task, the second is you copying your friend's work directly instead of asking him and the last one is where you sit in the class, now on the dunce chair because you got caught dmaing your work.
IRQ is an interrupt request by the hardware to inform the CPU of some event - the keyboard would send interrupts for key presses and releases. DMA is direct transfer of memory. A hard disk drive controller could send kilobytes of data message by DMA straight into system memory. The CPU had a special bus for writing to hardware. You read and wrote bytes down this bus by using the IN and OUT assembly language commands. In hex E6,60 would send the contents of AX to port 0x60 which was the speaker frequency. No volume control.
At 0:28 that looks more like a COAST than a disk controller. What kind of disk controller is it?
I miss those glory days.
PCI express lanes are the new IRQs. There is just not enough lanes!
Back in my college days (1995) my roommate and I spent 6 hours trying to get his brand new top of the line pentium pc to with the brand new plug and play bios to work with his soundblaster 16 which he held over from his old system. Those were not so good times.
Just recently tinkered one of my retro pc. Some have a tiny board with a all in one cpu chip, which is a pain in the butt conflicting irq at sbpro emulation at it's own will... also lack of bios settings, not partcular dos compatible. If I remember correctly it was a cyrix mediagx cpu.
Could you do a video about IRQ sharing?
Thank goodness PCI soundcards with DOS drivers handle this already.
Autoexec.bat, config.sys, how much do I NOT miss having to be concerned with them! But on the other hand, at least it made it necessary to understand a little more about how my computer worked more than is required these days.
I remember how annoying it was if u didn't know what u had and you'd just randomly select something hoping the sound would work
what is the medical encyclopedia software you are using in the video if i may ask ?
I could read "Bodyworks 5.0"
I was big into the Amiga and those computers had Autoconfig for the hardware. It was a nice way to handle things it it worked well unless you tried to--for instance--add more Zorro RAM than the computer motherboard could address.
It was a simple and effective version of "Plug & Play" before the Wintel systems got Plug and Play.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig
Is that a Compaq Prolinea at 0:30?
if the keyboard is irq 1 why is it that when you put in a cd into a cd drive the whole computer including keyboard stops until the disc is read?
Maybe it's IRQ 0.
So glad I don't have to deal with these things anymore.
I remember my second home computer. An odd Frankenstein 386 put together by my science teacher. It used a non ide hard drive. I guess cause that's what he had. When I bought a cdrom/soundcard kit, something about the new stuff kept the serial port (mouse) from working.
I even called tech support for creative. When I told them the.cable going to the hard drive wasn't 40pin, they gave up.
I finally just got a mouse emulator off aol. And used a joystick for cursor movement in cd games until I replaced some things.
Sorry for lack of details but this was 20 years ago in hs
computers are absolutely unlike a body
body is analog and merges cpu with memory on 2,5d space, while also not designating resources to always on input devices which are on standby
Of course computers are nothing like a body. Good lord.
you see the windows 95 is like a cabinet with two doors and a stained glass door while windows 98 is like a cupboard with two glass doors and 3 shelves
pointless bad analogies are pointless and bad
Never did understand why an IRQ conflict would often cause a freeze or cause one device to be non-functional instead of just the CPU reacting to the interrupt by checking both devices using that IRQ.
Lets see if i remember. Interupt requests, Direct Memory Access.....address ports? Not sure anymore but some how i seen to think of the addresses serial and parallel ports used
IRQ's were still present on the XP Comptia A+ examination that i passed in 2010. lmao
Thank the universe we never have to mess around with that old crap and plug and play saved us in the end!
I remember this crap from over 25 years ago!
Thats a fab explanation!
betamax80 thanks!
BEFORE plug & play? Keep in mind that well into this century, P&P was said 2 stand 4 "Plug & Pray" ;-)
Haha, I remember setting up sound in Blood so many times. Maybe I should go get my Pentium II out of storage....
"I live... Again..."
I don't miss the days of random IRQ conflicts rising when no hardware was changed.
The good ol' days when a computer required an operator.
I like your old Wang keyboard. It has a great sound to it. Sounds great quality.
ahh.. the lovely days of .. trying to get games to work...
What was the song at 7:27?
the computer man
Scatman John
What is it with the separate calling of things like 22?
why 2 2 instead of 22.
I never bothered with plug and play until Windows 2000 because I knew the statistics even though it was on Windows 98 SP2 and Millennium I skipped it. Windows NT/2000 was the first addition of Windows where the system worked. While I had issues with the traditional way, if I just keep with the system allowed with ways to fix the problem. Even this guy acknowledges plug and play didn't work worth a damn. Somehow they solved the problem I guess with the NT core because the operating system was less DOS shared. With Windows 95 and 98 Windows covered about 62% of the decisions which is more than half which is why windows 95 was called the first true operating system. in me they pushed it to 68% however windows ME was truly unstable causing users to reinstall it every 2 months. The information they gathered from user errors in which individual updates sometimes were provided, the information made NT which pushed it to somewhere around 78%. They used it threw XP and then shot for making a core that ran 100% of functions...this was vista. But the point is that there was a hang up in the communication between Windows, Dos, and the motherboard firmware causing hang-ups. I knew it, and so did Microsoft. It was why they were shooting for NT. Doesn't mean they were right making people pay for windows ME a test product as a standard upgrade. I know you all are hoping to NOT discuss Microsoft track record...its hard to prevent this link up why? Well, there was too much communication issue between the Triangle. Windows/Motherboard Firmware & MS Dos. There had to be a loser. Windows was modern tech preferred for the most part, Motherboard firmware was and still is the pinnical of start-up weather you see it or not because there has to be control handling before you are delivered safely to windows by your Motherboard manufacturing which manages the boot-time and registry of hooked devices. MS-Dos was elected, but this is a goal simply put.
Thanks to the advancements we don't have to deal with these boring stuff anymore.
2:18 damn that scary sound
Your profile pic... Classic.
There's one user, who has a single strand of hair on a white background as a profile pic. It fooled me thinking that my monitor got hair stuck onto it almost every time I see that user in the comments.
Negirno haha, I've seen that one. Damn these people.
hell yeah l like
So you could only have 4 cd drives then not 5... I don't know why you would need five but is this correct?
+Zac Meyers That depends on whether your CD drives are IDE or SCSI, or require a interface card. Originally, CD drives required an interface card, because the original IDE controller only allowed two hard drives, one as master and one as slave. You would have been correct; back then, each CD interface card required its own IRQ, DMA, and I/O address.
Then the ATAPI specification was updated to allow you to connect a CD drive to your IDE controller, so you could have one hard drive and one CD drive without needing a separate card for the CD drive. Then EIDE (Extended IDE) came along and added a second IDE channel, which could support an additional two IDE drives. It was common practice to attach your hard drive(s) to the first IDE channel, and CD drive(s) to the secondary channel. You could still connect additional hard drives or CD drives by adding expansion cards. For example, you can theoretically have four IDE channels, allowing you to connect a total of 8 IDE drives. However, the two extra channels often had software support problems because they were on a "nonstandard" IRQ; most drivers expected the IDE channels to be on IRQ 14 and 15. It's not as much of a problem these days because Plug & Play actually works (most of the time), and modern operating systems since Windows 95 SR2 have something called "PCI IRQ Steering", which allows multiple cards to share a single IRQ.
If you need more drives than that, you have to switch to SCSI. A single SCSI-2 host adapter can support up to 14 drives. And yes, you can mix-and-match... for example, you might have two or more IDE hard drives in a RAID configuration, then have multiple CD/DVD drives attached to a SCSI-2 host adapter. I've seen servers with up to 40 DVD drives.
SpearM3064 Wow thank you for that explaination. I can't imagine having to set up 40 DVD drives, hardware or software wise.
Correction in your video: all of the devices had separate BUT EQUAL IRQ addresses.
Back in those days, you were a bit of a guru if you could merely get a game running
wesmatron That's why those days were so special. You had to work to play your crap game!
"Disk controller"
*Shows picture of voltage regulator*
AIO inc. Shhhh, it looks pretty.
But it serves a completely different purpose
I miss jumpers. Jumpers were cool
Dipswitches where better though :) (Ah the time when you set your CPU Bus and multiplier and your memory speed and latency with dipswitches.
as kid I just always thrown random values for IRQ and stuff until got somewhat working result :D
What does it say about me that I learned more about human biology than I did about computers from this video?
I can not even imagine 4GB of RAM hanging off a 386. You would’ve been the most popular kid in the damn county.
I went from Amiga to PC so I could play Doom, but after the DMA channel goodness and Plug'n'Play feel of the Amiga and its relative ease-of-use, I was HORRIFIED by MS-DOS with all of this crap that should've been eliminated years before 1995. The PC has more powerful processors and Doom to use them on, but migrating from Amiga to MS-DOS was like A HUGE STEP BACKWARDS for me, and I'm sure, many thousands of others leaving the sinking Commodore ship!
Plug & pray 😂😂😂
Easy to understand, thanks for the explanation. Now I feel like less of a dummy when setting up my DOS game audio settings :)
what the hex!
HMI Module Alpha Humana on approach to Space Station Mercury
wait you mean to tell me the 386 can address 4 GB (4096MB) of ram?
Those days were awful in retrospect. At the time however, it was just an expected step in getting your game (or whatever) up and running. We just tolerated it - because we had to. Same as waiting for a game to load on a Commodore 64. It was what it was.
Who had not a Turboloader Cart for the C64? Okay, a Friend of mine. But most Users had one.
I wasn't so lucky I suppose :)
The AdLib uses port 388. I know that much.
I had a SB16 (1992), That thing was not plug and play and was a top quality sound card for almost 10 years. Non plug'n'play means i dont have to have any drivers for it to work.
Surly im not the only one that misses the configuration jumpers, But fuck that these days.
ProCactus I only dealt with it bcuz of my live digital recordings.... liked to give up on music 4ever... but actually with jumpers irqs complexity with bigger machine for networking. .. I salute the intelligence community during the cold war... life or death