[henrikschroder]

It wasn't about "tuning", you simply needed to configure everything so there weren't any collisions, and this depended on whatever other expansion cards and ports you had in your PC, because there was a limited amount of IRQ channels (2, 5, 7, 10), DMA channels (0, 1, 3), and I/O addresses (0x220, 0x240, 0x260, 0x280) that expansion cards could use.

The original 8-bit cards could be configured through jumpers on the card, and the settings you put into autoexec.bat or individual setup programs for your games, simply had to match the hardware settings.

Later, plug'n'play meant that your PC's BIOS could auto-detect and auto-assign everything to avoid collisions, so you didn't have to bother with it.

[crtasm]

The tuning part is to free up enough of the base 640k of RAM to allow certain games to even run.

[verst]

Exactly, or else we'd get the dreaded message of having insufficient "conventional" memory. Tuning autoexec.bat and config.sys were necessary.

[q-big]

> Later, plug'n'play meant that your PC's BIOS could auto-detect and auto-assign everything to avoid collisions

which at the beginning was rather plug and pray.