this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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Big keyboard jack, serial for mouse, parallel for printer
Don't forget the serial input for gamepads and joysticks in the dedicated sound board for some reason
Except that wasn't a serial port, it was midi, and the reason it was on the sound card was because the input was analog.
Your joystick was just two fancy potentiometers, and your soundcard decoded the voltage on the middle legs into a position.
Soundcards handled joysticks because they had the fastest ADCs.
They didn't even use an ADC. They used 555 timers to produce a pulse. They measured the length of the pulse to determine the potentiometer position. Since there are 4 analog inputs, they typically used the 558 timer which is the quad version of the 555.
And here I thought I had it all figured out. But it does make sense. Doing it with an analog signal introduces noise and measuring pulse widths is going to be simpler.
I don't know what I'm going to do with this information but I'm glad it's in my brain now.
Wow, 30 years later and I'm just learning this now. Thank you
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port
The 15-pin D-sub connector itself was apparently a combination of analog and digital. It had to be, since MIDI is digital (it's right there in the name: Musical Instrument Digital Interface). TIL it wasn't all digital.
huh, i thought it was just because "owning a sound card" and "likely to play games" was the biggest overlap of the Venn circles.
Considering MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, I have no idea what you're trying to say.
Early PC only had 5 card slots, and the only jack on the motherboard was the keyboard. One slot is going to be used by a video card, one’s probably being used by a hard drive controller, one’s probably used by a parallel + serial card. Soundcards also included controller ports to try to save a slot.
I thought sometimes they called them game ports (for the joystick.)
I reasoned if you are installing a sound card, you are probably doing some gaming, so it made sense to sort of bundle those together.
Its on the sound card because it's a midi port. Its designed for connecting a keyboard (as in electronic piano). Most people used it for gamepads but that's not what it was there for.
And because the PC only have 1 serial port, you disconnect the printer and use a parallel to serial adapter.
@josefo@leminal.space @JoMiran@lemmy.ml
Technically speaking, the joystick involved analog voltages to be converted to digital signals... And what else have ADC (analog-to-digital converters) chips? Soundcards, because ADCs are used to convert mic input, alongside the "line in", both of which are analog voltages, into PCM signals, which are discrete (as in "non-continuous") streams of bits. Something inverse happens for "headphone", "speakers" and "line out" pins: a PCM stream coming from the sound driver is converted to analog voltages using a DAC.
While other ports also happened to deal with analog<->digital conversion, a soundcard was particularly specialized at this job, alongside graphic (VGA) cards (VGA has lots of analog signals), but graphic cards were already too busy with thousands/millions of pixels and, well, with computation of graphics.
Other boards aren't so fitting for analog-digital job. For example: a NIC (Network Interface Card) already deals with digital signal so, theoretically, no conversion is necessary from/to analog. Parallel ports (those for printers) also natively deals with digital signals. Expansion cards with USB ports, same thing. And so on...
(Apologies for my blank reply if my deletion didn't federate due to insufficient Sharkey-Lemmy federation, I mistyped enter as I was getting ready to write my message)
And because the PC only have 1 serial port, you disconnect the printer and use a parallel to serial adapter.
Yes, this is where my PC master gaming started.
They all got bought by acer and turned into the shittiest brand-name PCs on the planet.
Wasn’t gateway already shitty to begin with?
All the naysayers never used a Gateway AnyKey keyboard... their loss.
Such nice keyboards. My Gateway 2000 was from 1991 and I believe they were pretty top notch at the time. It wasn't until later that they went to shit. Through all the years and the massive amounts of mods, it didn't fail until I retired it sometime in the mid to late 2000's and only because home routers now did what it could do...faster and for a lot let power. It's still in storage and I bet that if I powered it on today, it would boot.
This one for me. Was born in 82.
Born in '88 and this was also my childhood. But to be fair, my parents bought the PC from Sears so it was probably an older, budget model. It ran Windows 3.1 and had a 16 MHz 386 with the Turbo button.
My 286 had PS/2 ports instead of the obsolete DIN keyboard/serial mouse.
smug_look_of_superiority.jpgNailed it! I was going to post the DIN-5 kb connector.
I'm in this picture.