There where three. The full din keyboard plug, serial for your mouse and that unholy thing on the back of your sound blaster on which you could connect a joystick.

[–] umbraroze@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 day ago

Somewhere in my giant box of cables I have an adapter for attaching MIDI cables to the joystick port. When I actually used a MIDI keyboard with it, I had... variable success.

The first time I had a MIDI keyboard that just worked, it used USB as transport. (And it has worked great since. I think it's the only USB Mini plug device device I still regularly use.)

Crazy thing is, MIDI is absolutely ancient. You'd imagine it'd work fine on the gameports, but nope. Legacy PC ports are cursed. Except audio jacks and serial ports, and VGA if you're really into screwing things in place.

[–] the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's a midi port

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's supposed to be, but it's really just a joystick port.

[–] the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's how most people used it, yeah. But it's meant to be a midi port which is why it's on sound cards.

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It often worked poorly as such though. While it worked great as a joystick port. I drew my own conclusions.

[–] the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Tbf most things worked poorly back then. I constantly had to pop my 386 open and jiggle the ram to get it to boot

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's... not typical though.

[–] the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

It was. Hardware was absolute trash in the early-mid 90s.