Re: "OS/2 Warp"
(My copy of OS/2 Warp came bundled with a SB16 sound card and a CD-Rom drive to hook up to it).
That reminds me of one of the fixes I saw while browsing through the bug list. It stuck in my mind because it showed how much of an effort IBM was making to ensure VDM<->DOS compatibility. And it sounds like 'cool geeky programmer stuff' :)
There was a very good golf game for DOS. For its time, graphically excellent. Digitised images for the course and contours for the greens. While you were playing there'd be bird song and occasionally running water. The fix I remember seeing was for the sound card. Apparently the game was causing problems because it tried to send the samples to the card 10,000+ times a second and the VDM couldn't service the interrupts that fast. I think the fix IBM implemented was to have OS/2 take over controlling the sound card so that the VDM didn't need to raise interrupts. So presumably they emulated the SB hardware for the VDM. Cool stuff :)
Mind you I also remember them getting snippy because so many joysticks of the time were not programmable and that broke their driver model. A similar problem was that they expected all printers to be connected using Centronix cables with the Acknowledge pin wired up and functional. They seemed quite offended when they discovered that most printers of the time had that feature disabled and/or the owner was using a cheap cable that didn't have the pin connected.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
