I've seen the world of computer and videogaming evolve since its earliest days. Hell, I remember a friend of the family sneaking me on to Nellis Air Force base in Nevada so he could show me a punchcard game called Space War. You didn't look at graphics on a monitor, that was still years away. Instead, the graphics were nothing more than asterisks on a piece of rigid paper. Now that I've successfully betrayed my age, I can wax poetically about the relics of the past that have long since been phased out of digital evolution. Back in the day, there were no casual players. It required total commitment because just getting a game installed and successfully launched was half the battle. In some cases, all the technical nightmares were ultimately more challenging than the games themselves.

Without further ado, here are some relics from a bygone era, as reported by members of the Game Almighty writing crew:

IRQ Settings – Chris Jensen

Before Windows came along and made life (somewhat) simpler, all gamers had to deal with DOS. The mouse had yet to be invented, so we all had to learn a bunch of commands just to get games installed. Once safely on the hard drive, the real fun began when it came time to get the sound working. Every game required you to input archaic variables for system settings just so your soundcard could communicate with the CPU. The problem is, every other peripheral connected to your computer, plus motherboard operations, had to have their own unique IRQ setting. With only 15 available options, conflicts were inevitable, so you'd spend hours, if not days, trying to find the right number without screwing everything else up. Even if you were successful with the IRQ, you then had to set the DMA channel and I/O address, and this just led to more frustration.

However, the real fun was finally getting everything just right and returning to the game the next day and discovering that, for no particular reason, a reboot had restored everything to default settings. Ahhh, the glory days.

Joystick Calibration – Chris Jensen

USB is for lazy people! Back in the day, we didn't just plug'n play with a joystick, oh no! We had to hook that baby up to the soundcard (and deal with more IRQ conflicts), and calibrate that bad boy EVERY SINGLE TIME. Push the stick to the top-left, press fire button. Push the stick to the bottom-right, press fire button. Center stick, press fire button. This all assumed that the program in question actually detected your joystick, which more often than not, it didn't.

Code Wheels/Manual Protection – Christiaan Allebest

A lot of us bitch and moan about Starforce and CD keys, usually with good reason. Nobody likes losing a CD-ROM drive to copy protection or entering in a 25-character code string to install a game. But in the old days, it was far more complicated and time consuming than that as publishers and developers put the burden of keeping their games from being copied squarely in your lap. We weren’t coddled by programs like SecuROM and SafeDisc which ask you to simply keep the CD in the drive, we had to use code wheels in conjunction with the manual every time you started up the game. A code wheel consisted of two (or three!) cardboard disks of different sizes that were secured together at the center by a grommet. Small windows cut into the cardboard discs would allow you to see information underneath after you had lined them up correctly. As an example of their use, a player would start up the game and be asked a question as to how to find the answer in the game’s manual. As an example from an old personal favorite, “What should you do when a Spathi approaches you and says: ‘Supox’ (Find the answer in the manual on page 32, paragraph 3, line 3, word 5.” You would get a word that would be on the edge of the code wheel, match it up to another word and then the answer would be displayed through one of the cut-out windows closer to the center of the disc. More often than not the answer you found in the manual was wrong, so you’d have to try to get a new question until you actually found one that worked. And remember – that was a chore that had to be done every time you wanted to play the game and that was all before you could find the answers posted somewhere on the interweb.