IRQ conflicts! Holy mother of hell IRQ conflicts! particularly when dealing with those early gen Sound Blasters -- and trying to get that Roland MT32 you borrowed from the greasy weirdo in your big brother's band hooked up and pumping out that sweet, sweet midi
Recently I had this surface, some RT kernel extension we use would display possible conflicts. Despite programming a lot these days, my background is electronic engineering, so I still have a rough idea of what an IRQ is and does even on the lowest level. However had no luck trying to explain that to a 'pure' programmer.
> "However had no luck trying to explain that to a 'pure' programmer."
Interrupt requests are easy to explain to even a novice computer user if you frame them in the context of something they're familiar with.
For example, when you press a key on your keyboard an interrupt request will be created to make sure the computer knows you've pressed the key. So in simplified terms, you could say when you press the "A" key on your keyboard, there is a part of the computer that says "pause what other things you're doing, respond to the "A" key press, then continue with what you were doing before".
